Spearman's Model of Intelligence and Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences are similar and alike in many ways. The theory of intelligence as largely a single entity was first formulated in the first decade of the 20th century by Charles Spearman (1904), who showed that all cognitive abilities are positively inter-correlated, such that people who do well on some tasks tend to do well on all the others. Spearman invented the statistical method of factor analysis to show that the efficiency of performance on all cognitive tasks is partly determined by a common factor. He designated this common factor, g, for [general intelligence.]
On the other hand, Gardner proposed that the psychometrician's "g" became the standard interpretation partly because it was easily measurable by IQ and other related standardized tests. But Gardner forcefully argues that the IQ and other standardized tests only measure a small portion of intelligence, to wit, linguistic and logical/mathematical abilities. In "surveying the work of other scholars" on brain research and cognition, Gardner comes up with the major idea that there is more to intelligence than can be measured by the IQ and offers his theory of multiple intelligence thus "proposing a new orientation." (Armstrong Thomas 1994)
To explain the existence of the common factor, Spearman proposed that there must be some general mental power that determines the performance on all cognitive tasks and is responsible for the positive inter-correlation of these abilities. Spearman also proposed that in addition to g, there are a number of specific abilities that determine the performance on particular kinds of tasks, over and above the effect of g.
The same thing was depicted by Gardner in a rather different way but with different style and presentation. Gardner believed that Frames of Mind is a brilliant, provocative, and gracefully written book.............
