Abstract:
Along with my colleague, Dr Hilda Rosselli, I believed that Gardner's framework would be particularly effective for identifying cognitive strengths in children who did not stand out when the traditional psychometric view of intelligence was applied. In the United States, children from low socio-economic backgrounds and African-American or Hispanic heritage are vastly over-represented in school failure statistics; the same children are vastly under-represented in gifted education programs. To exacerbate this situation, African-American families are over- represented in the poverty statistics (Center for the Study of Social Policy, 1986). Some researchers attribute these school failure statistics to the system's reliance on conventional assessment procedures (Staples, 1986; Hale-Benson, 1986). To address this imbalance and using Gardner's theory and the early findings from Project Spectrum, we undertook the Prism Study in 1991. Within the context of the larger study, my own research contribution was to develop case studies on a small number of children to test the efficacy of MI theory as a framework for identifying children's cognitive strengths (Vialle, 1991).