Study of human intelligence at center of Michael Gardner’s career

Michael Gardner, PhD, says he's always been intrigued by what makes people different, as well as the ways in which they're the same. A professor and researcher in the educational psychologyopens in new window department in the education school at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Gardner investigates basic intelligence functions, like reasoning and problem solving, memory and aging, and the value of achievement tests for school children.

Gardner enjoys his job and says he would recommend academia to any young psychologists looking for a career path.

"You get to choose the problems you work on; you have a lot of flexibility; you work with bright and interesting people, both colleagues and students; and it's fun to come to work, at least at the University of Utah, which is a pretty good place," says Gardner, who is also director of the learning sciences program at the university.

Neither of Gardner's parents went to college. His father worked at the Alcoa factory in Edgewater, New Jersey. But Gardner was valedictorian (with three others) of his high school class in Bogota, New Jersey. He applied to three colleges and was accepted at two — nearby Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, one of the top schools in the country. After much deliberation, and on advice from a teacher and the father of a friend, he chose Stanford.

It wasn't always easy to be that far from home — financially or psychically — for a boy who had never before been east of Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, "it was the right decision," he says. "Going to Stanford changed my life in ways I couldn't imagine at the time."

Gardner took advantage of the excellent academic smorgasbord at Stanford, taking classes in math, journalism and creative writing, all of which had interested him for a while. "All those things turned out to be useful" later on in his career, he says.

One of the classes Gardner took was a psychology class on memory, taught by the late Edward E. Smith, a leading researcher on the subject, who became Gardner's adviser.

"I was so impressed with that class, and with the area of memory, that I decided that I wanted to do cognitive psychology for my career," Gardner recalls.

While still at Stanford, he began specializing in human intelligence, even though at the time, he says, the consensus was that everything that could be discovered on the topic had been discovered. He worked with a graduate student, Robert J. Sternberg, who later developed the triarchic theory of intelligence, one of the major theories to emerge as psychologists began to question the prevailing monolithic view of intelligence. Gardner followed Sternberg to Yale University, the one school that had turned him down for college, and did his graduate work in psychology there.

When he finished, Gardner knew he wanted to teach, but faculty jobs were scarce. It took two years of applying and a bit of serendipity before Utah's educational psychology department hired him specifically because he had a background in intelligence, he says.

It's hard to find a definition of intelligence everybody agrees on. The topic has only been studied in scientific terms for about 100 years, and it's almost inescapably tied up with what it means to be successful. Intelligence has cultural implications, too, because different societies define success differently; the concept has frequently been abused in the service of establishing hierarchies involving race or class or other distinctions.

When he first began studying the topic, Gardner says, intelligence was viewed as an attribute that everyone was thought to have in varying degrees. The IQ test, developed during this period, assigns people numerically to a spot on a spectrum of intelligence. More recently, Sternberg and Howard Gardner theorized that there are different types of intelligence that explain why different people excel at different things, like the arts or even interpersonal relationships. Now researchers are more likely to approach intelligence from a neuroscience perspective, asking what is going on in the brain that makes a person smart. With every new turn, there's a tendency to think this is the real story, Gardner says.

"I think we're fooling ourselves if we think we understand it all," he says. He thinks intelligence, while it predates the school experience, is usefully assessed in terms of that experience.

"I've always felt like there's some truth to the original definitions, that it's the ability to do well in school or in school-like environments," Gardner says, and notes that people who test well academically have been shown to go on to be more successful in their work lives as well.

All the players in today's high-stakes education business — students, teachers, administrators, testers, school districts and the government — are under a lot of pressure, and they all have different concerns, Gardner notes. Any yardstick used to decide which students get access to the best outcomes is going to be vulnerable to criticism. When it comes to academic testing, the most important gauge of their validity is the use to which the scores will be put.

"It's a complicated process, and we aren't necessarily producing enough people trained in psychometrics to work in these areas," he says.

Gardner is fascinated by the extent to which unexpected variables thwart the most carefully devised experiments. For example, he and a colleague were researching how to help older people remember random numbers like those used as PIN numbers for bank accountsopens in new window. The researchers offered older people and college students money to participate in five sessions, during which subjects entered numbers into keyboards and got feedback about accuracy. The college students showed up faithfully for all the sessions, but "money didn't move the needle for the older people," Gardner says; they would only come back if they liked the research assistant who was running the experiment.

"I learned a lot of things about running studies with older people," he says. "Number one, it helps if you have a big pool of them. We didn't, so it took six years to collect the data. Somebody occasionally asks me why haven't I done more work [with older people]. The reason is that I'm getting too old myself to spend six years on a study."