Stephen Wagner

Assessing Level of Thinking & MI

March 24^th, 1999

Student #1

Student number one was a male student around 13 years of age. He was in the seventh grade enrolled in keyboarding I. A good description of the student would be as follows. He seems to have above average intelligence for his grade level. My understanding from his teachers is that he excels in all his subjects and is a big help in their classrooms.

We began the interview with question number one. I gave the student five different one-digit numbers on separate sheets of paper. The student did the task in a random order. He did not have any really logical way that I could witness of doing the task. He found himself repeating sequences of the same numbers several times and quickly became annoyed with the question.

We then moved on to question number two involving the creation of sandwiches. The student this time took on the task in a very orderly and systematic fashion. He first listed the word ham and added all the combinations of breads and dressings, then listed the turkey and all of its combinations. He completed this question entirely in this way and did not seem frustrated with it at all.

When the student was asked if he talks himself through a problem silently or out loud, the student stated that he did both. He said that when he is working a hard math homework problem it helps him to think out loud. When he is in class, he talks silently to himself. He told me that he does this most often in math class. Math was not difficult to him, he said it just made working the problems easier when he talked to himself or out loud.

The student said that he sometimes will ask others to help with class work or homework but not too often. He made an interesting comment to me about this. He said that when he asks others in class for help, they always tell him they do not know. I asked his teacher after the interview why they might do this to him. She said that most of the class thought he was the smartest in class and if he did not know then they did not know either. This could have some reason to him not asking for help from others of his own age.

I honestly believe that this student misunderstood the meaning of the multiple intelligence test. He answered almost every part of every intelligence in the test. From the best assessment that I could give of his test, the student is very logical-mathematical, has a strong naturalist intelligence, and is linguistically intelligent as well. The student also marked every single item under interpersonal intelligence and all but two of the intrapersonal intelligence items.

The switch between formal operational thinking and concrete operational thinking when the first two questions were asked is somewhat confusing. Why did the student take on the first question in a random order and the second one in a very precise operation? Why did he become frustrated with the first question after a few minutes and want to move onto something else?

This type of student has a good chance of gaining knowledge in any type of classroom he is in. Whether it be teacher-directed, student-directed, or any combination, he would probably learn. The best applications for this student would be to add more challenging course work for this student to tackle. I do not mean for him to have more work, just more challenging, so that he will be stimulated not bored. Some good applications for this type of student might be to receive guidance from the gifted and talented coordinator to find out any lessons that might be appropriate for this student. Provide the student with tremendous amounts of hands-on experience in some type of logical-mathematical setting. I would also allow the student to explore further in each of his subjects to find out just what interested him.

There are several applications in the business education classroom that would be appropriate. If the student could be persuaded to enroll in an accounting course, I could stimulate his logical-mathematical intelligence by adding more challenging and in-depth accounting procedures for him to take on. He would enjoy the intrapersonal skills needed to be enrolled in our FBLA chapter. So much could be offered to him if he were to join. For example, he could participate in accounting competitions, parliamentary procedures, and the many other contests that FBLA has to offer. In technology courses he could have hands-on experience with desktop publishing and would be allowed to explore and offer his own ideas in creating published work. There is so much business education could offer him.