Rethinking what we mean by intelligence

Abstract

Society largely has accepted a conception of general intelligence that is ill-fitted to the world we live in today. Our standardized tests are based on this conception, as is much of our instruction. The problem is that the kinds of problems we test for and teach to are unlike the complex problems we face in real life. In this article, Robert Sternberg introduces a conception of adaptive intelligence as the kind of intelligence we need to cope adequately with the problems the world is currently throwing at us. He discusses adaptive intelligence and how it differs from general intelligence and gives examples of the kinds of problems schools can use to teach and assess for such intelligence.