Intelligence

I did not know everything about intelligence before I started doing this paper. After I started on this paper I found that there are many different styles and forms of intelligence. Many different researchers have done studies on intelligence such as longitudinal research where the same individuals are studied over a long period of time, and then there is the Flynn effect, developed by James Flynn, which showed a trend toward increasing average IQ, found in all developing countries during the twentieth century, another way intelligence was studied was through cross-sequential research which is a hybrid research method in which researchers first study several groups of people of different ages and then follow those groups over the years, one good example of this kind of research is a study that was conducted by K. Warner Schaie named the Seattle Longitudinal Study, and this study showed that people improve in most mental abilities during adulthood. In my study I observed children playing and doing many different problem-solving activities over a period of time. During this time I noticed that many different styles of intelligence that are used in childhood. Robert Sternberg said that there are three fundamental forms of intelligence including analytic intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence. The children I observed expressed their intelligence in many of these forms. In this paper I will show how the children’s words and actions portrayed the type of intelligence they possessed, I will also show how I went about observing the children o gather the information needed for my project. Lastly I will show how a child’s inability to do everything that an adult can shows the differences in adult and children’s intelligences.

It is fairly easy to tell a person’s intelligence just by observing how they solve problems and just by the way they talk. The children I observed were in the age range of about seven or eight years old. They would sit at the table and work puzzles for a long period of time without any kind of interruptions. Them being able to sit down and do this type of problem solving showed me that they have a higher intelligence than a two or three year old would possess. There intelligence is not much less than the intelligence of a teenager. The two main forms of intelligence that I observed while watching the children were analytic intelligence and creative intelligence. Analytic intelligence is a form of intelligence that involves such mental processes as abstract planning, strategy selection, focused attention, and information processing, as well as verbal and logical skills. These children show this when they would work the puzzles and how they would figure out to work through the mazes in some of the workbooks they had. The other form of intelligence that was seen most was creative intelligence, and creative intelligence is a form of intelligence that involves the capacity to be intellectually flexible and innovative. These children expressed this form of intelligence in the same way that analytic intelligence was expressed by the other children, through the process of working puzzles and figuring out the way through certain mazes in their workbooks.

The way I went about observing these children to gather information is much like that the way the U.S. Army tested their soldiers. Instead of giving a test I observed them doing work in their workbooks. I used my brother, which is twenty-four years old, as a comparison during my research. The type of research I used is cross-sectional research in which I observed two different age groups over a certain period of time and observed the differences