(This notes are for M.Ed. students. B.Ed. students don't need this topic in the depth covered as in this.
However B.Ed. students can go through it and understand!!)
Prepared by
SABARISH-P
M.Sc., M.Ed., JRF & NET
Assistant Professor in Physical Science, Arafa Institute for Teacher Education
Attur, Thrissur.
Introduction
J P
Guilford was a psychologist involved during the world war ӀӀ in developing
tests to select candidates for training as pilots. As he expanded his
interesting to testing Various other specific thinking skills, he developed a
model to guide his research & to organize his thinking about all the
various skills he was testing.
Guilford
announced his intention to use a factor analytic technique to begin isolating
the various factors of thinking,to separate our creativity & other skills
from the factors measured by IQ.
He
developed a model of intellect on the basis of the factor analysis of several
tests employed for testing intelligence of human beings. And came to the
conclusion that any mental process or intellectual activity of the human being
can be described in terms of 3 basic dimensions or parameters know as operation
(the act of thinking or the way of processing the information); contents (the
terms in which we think or the type of information involved); and the
products(the ideas we come up with i.e., the fruits of a thinking).
Each
of these parameters – operation, contents, product may be further subdivided
into some specific factors or elements. As a result, operations may be
subdivided into 5 specific factors, contents into 5 & products into 6. The
interaction of these 3 parameters, according to Guilford, thus results into the
5*5*6 = 150 different elements or factors in one’s intelligence. He sought to
develop tests for each combination of the possibilities on these 3 dimensions,
expecting that a person could be high on some of these abilities while being
low on others.
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Guilford’s model of intellect
Contents
By content he meant that
different people seemed to pay more attention to and think more effectively
about different kinds of information, such as:
o Visual information directly from the senses or from imaging, Informations
like colour
of objects,shape & size
of figures,etc.
o Auditory information directly from the senses or from images.
Sound of birds or
animals,sound of a musical instrument,etc.
o Symbolic items such as words and symbols which generally convey
some meaning,numbers,letters,symbols,designs etc.
o Semantic : meanings of words,ideas.
o Behavioral : The actions & expression of people.The information
about the mental states and behavior of observed individuals.
This type of content was
added to the model based on abilities that emerged from his testing. Daniel
Goleman (1995) has popularized this as “social intelligence”. An artist might
excel at processing visual information, but be poor at processing words,
numbers and other symbolic content. A researcher who excels at processing symbolic
content such as words and numbers and semantic meaning, might be very poor at
processing behavioral data and thus relate poorly with people.
Operation
The operations dimension
describes what the brain does with and to these types of information:
o Cognition : recognizing & discovering. It has to do with the
ability to perceive the various items. For example, the cognition of semantic
units has to do with one's ability to recognize words, i.e. one's vocabulary.
Cognition of Behavioral Transformations would be the ability to perceive
changes in the expressions of an individual.
o Memory has to do with the ability to store and retrieve various
kinds of information. People differ in their abilities to remember not only
from other people, but also among various kinds of information. Some people who
are poor at remembering faces (behavioral units) may be excellent at
remembering puns (semantic transformations).
o Divergent production has to do with the ability to access memory.
It refers to the ability to find large numbers of things which fit certain
simple criteria. For example, just a word circle will remind a person about so
many objects in circular shape. Among which one has to be identified based on
other criteria, if any.
o Convergent Production : producing a single best solution to a
problem. It is associated with IQ & is often tested for skill.
Example, the search of memory
for the single answer to a question or situation. This area includes most areas
of logic type problem solving. It differs from divergence in the constraint of
one right answer..
o Evaluation is the ability to make judgments about the various
kinds of information, judgments such as which items are identical in some way,
which items are better, and what qualities are shared by various items.
Products
The products dimension
relates to the kinds of information we process from the content types:
o Units refers to the individual pieces of information limited in
size. The units in a content area. This might be symbolic units such as words,
visual units such as shapes, or behavioral units such as facial expressions.
o Classes refers to the ability to organize units into meaningful
groups and to sort units into the right groups. Relate units to each other on
the basis of some common characteristics.
Example , men + women = people
o Relations pertains to the ability to sense the relationships
between pairs of units.A connection between concepts. Relating the date to the
day.
o Systems consist of the relationships among more than two units. An
ordering or classification of relations.
o Transformations is the ability to understand changes in
information, such as rotation of visual figures, or jokes and puns in the
semantic area.
o Implications refers to expectation. Given a certain set of
information, one might expect
certain other information to
be true. Making inferences from separate pieces of information.
Conclusion
In this way, according to Guilford’s model of intellect,
there are 150 factors operating in one’s
intelligence. Each one of these factors has a trigram symbol i.e., at least one
factor from each category of 3 parameters has to be present in any specific
intellectual activity or mental task.
Suppose a child is asked to find out the day of the
week on a particular
date with the
help of a calendar. In the execution of this mental task, he will need
mental
operations like convergent thinking, memory & cognition. For these
operations,
he will make use of the content, ‘semantics’ i.e., reading & understanding
of the printed words & figures indicating
days & dates of a particular month in the
calendar. Finally he will arrive at the
products i.e., the day of the week to which the
date
refers in the question, which represents the factor ‘relations’ .
References :
·
Essentials of Educational Psychology – S.K.Mangal
·
Guilford’s structure of the Intellect – Christopher M Barlow
