8/2/2019 1 an Introduction to Educational Psychology

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1 An introduction to educational psychology

particularly if they cease to be hypothetical and are treated as if they really exist. It is far less dangerous

and more helpful to treat intelligence as a descriptive term - an adjective or adverb. Thus, we can refer

to someone acting more or less intelligently or demonstrating intelligent behaviour in a particular

circumstance. This is another area where information processing models have been particularly helpful.

In particular, the cognitive psychologist, Robert Sternberg, has reconceptualised intelligence in terms of

people's purposeful adaptation to the real world. He argues that what may be intelligent behaviour in

one country or cultural context might be viewed as unintelli-gent in another. The kind of behaviour that

would be interpreted as intelligent in an academic private school might serve no recognisably intelli-

gent function in a slum area of a city and vice versa. Sternberg (1985) proposed a triarchic theory of

intelligence which, as its name suggests, contains three major sets of components. Metacomponents (or

executive skills) are the cognitive skills employed in planning and decision making. These include the

recognition that a problem exists, awareness of various possible strategies to solve it, allocation oi time

and monitoring of one's attempts to find a solution. Performance components include tht-. basic

operations involved in actually solving any given Task, such i-n-fd7rm- atiOn-,-iefitial thinking and

drawing comparisons. Knowledge acquisition components are the processes used in acq -iring new

knowledge, such as selecting relevant rather than irrelevant in lormation, integrating the new

knowledge in a meaningful way and relating :t to wha:' is already known. - Since the main emphasis in

this approach is placed upon the conception of intelligent behaviour as the appropriate use of cognitive

skills and strategies within specific contexts, it frees us from conceiving of it as some-thing that is static

and fixed. It also enables us to see that people can become more intelligent and that schools can (and

should) play a part in this. This view of course has powerful implications for language teachers. If we

hold such a view, we then believe that we can help all learners to become better at language learning.

We free ourselves from the concept of learners possessing a fixed amount of aptitude for language, and

see everyone capable of succeeding, given appropriate teaching. One of the challenges for the language

teacher is to help learners to develop the strategies needed to learn a language more effectively, a

principle which is embodied in the current work on learner training in English as a foreign language

(EFL). It also follows that learning how to think effectively should be an important aspect of education,

which needs to be taught independently and through subject domains. This important principle will be

taken up again in Chapter 8 where we shall focus on ways in which language teaching can involve

teaching learners how to become more effective thinkers.

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