Robert J. Sternberg

co-author of Explorations in Giftedness and The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence

February 4, 2012

Robert Jeffrey Sternberg, is an American psychologist and psychometrician and Provost at Oklahoma State University. He was formerly the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University and the President of the American Psychological Association. He is a member of the editorial boards of numerous journals, including American Psychologist. Sternberg has a BA from Yale University and a PhD from Stanford University. He holds ten honorary doctorates from one North American, one South American, and eight European universities, and additionally holds an honorary professorate at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He is currently also a Distinguished Associate of The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge.

SATs, ACTs, GPAs. Everyone knows that these scores can't tell a college everything that's important about an applicant. But what else should admissions officers look for, and how can they know it when they see it? In College Admissions for the 21st Century a leading researcher on intelligence and creativity offers a bold and practical approach to college admissions testing.

Standardized tests are measures of memory and analytical skills. But the ever-changing global society beyond a college campus needs more than just those qualities, argues Robert Sternberg. Tomorrow's leaders and citizens also need creativity, practicality, and wisdom.

How can the potential for those complex qualities be measured? One answer is Kaleidoscope, a new initiative in undergraduate admissions, first used at Tufts University. Its open-ended questions for applicants, and the means used to score the answers, gives applicants and admissions officers the chance to go beyond standardized tests.

Does it work? As Sternberg describes in detail, Kaleidoscope measures predicted first-year academic success, over and above SATs and high school GPAs, and predicted first-year extracurricular activities, leadership, and active citizenship as well. And every year that Kaleidoscope measures were used, the entering class's average SATs and high school GPAs went up too.

What worked at Tufts can work elsewhere. New kinds of assessments, like Kaleidoscope, can liberate many colleges and students from the narrowness of standardized tests and inspire new approaches to teaching for new kinds of talented, motivated citizens of the world.

Explorations in Giftedness is a scholarly overview of the modern concepts, definitions, and theories of intellectual giftedness, and of past and current developments in the field of gifted education. The authors consider, in some detail, the roles of intelligence, creativity, and wisdom in giftedness and the interaction between culture and giftedness, as well as how giftedness can be understood in terms of a construct of developing expertise. The authors also review and discuss a set of key studies that address the issues of identification and education of children with intellectual gifts. This volume may be used as a summary overview of the field for educators, psychologists, social workers, and other professionals who serve intellectually gifted children and their families.

Based on an extensive research, Teaching for Wisdom, Intelligence, Creativity, and Success (a practical teaching resource) provides instructional and assessment guidelines for strengthening students' higher-order thinking and reasoning skills.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2012-honorees/robert-sternberg

Last Updated: 12 January 2022