Our classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse. Approximately 14 percent of the current school population does not speak English at home, and an increasing number of children with disabilities are being placed in general education classrooms. This change requires a shift in educational strategies if we are to reach the students in present classrooms (Coustan, Rocka, 1999). Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences has offered educators a comprehensive framework within which fundamentally different solutions can be implemented. A tenet of Multiple Intelligence theory is that people learn, represent, and utilize knowledge in many different ways. These differences challenge an educational system which assumes that everyone can learn the same materials in the same way and that a uniform, universal measure suffices to test student learning. According to Gardner, "the broad spectrum of students - and perhaps the society as a whole--would be better served if disciplines could be presented in a number of ways and learning could be assessed through a variety of means" (Gardner, 1991).
According to Gardner, all humans possess and exhibit these seven intelligences, and individuals possess varying amounts of these intelligences and combine them and use them in personal and idiosyncratic ways. These differences exert profound effects upon the child as a student, determining, for example, which "entry point," (a story, an image, hands-on activity) is most likely to be effective for a given student in encounters with new material, and less happily, which concepts are likely to be confused with one another. We might think of the topic as a room with at least five doors or entry points into it (Coustan, Rocka, 1999). Students vary as to which entry point is the most appropriate for them and which routes are most comfortable to follow once they have gained initial access to the room. Awareness....
