Still Searching for the Zipperump‐a‐Zoo: A Reflection After 40 Years

Abstract

In this article, I describe chronologically my attempts over a 40‐year career to understand the nature of human intelligence. I explain how later attempts built on earlier ones, with each attempt revealing the earlier one to be too limited and narrow in the questions it asked. In my early work, I envisioned intelligence in terms of components of information processing. Later, I viewed these components as contributing to three distinct but related aspects of intelligence: analytical, creative, and practical. I came to realize the importance of contextual factors in determining what constitutes adaptive behavior. Still later, I viewed wisdom as part of the mix. The search has been rewarding, except for the fact that I have not yet completed it and never will.

What Is Wisdom? A Unified 6P Framework

“…Our purpose here is not to get into an argument over whether the Gottfredson statements are correct or not; rather, it is to say that consensuses of experts are often questionable and change, sometimes quickly, over time, as has become obvious with the COVID-19 crisis that is raging at the time this article is being written. Indeed, our own “expert” ideas have changed over the course of our careers (see, for example, Sternberg, 2015).…”

Critical-Thinking Assessment Table: A Novel Strategy to Foster Students’ Critical Thinking Dispositions

“…However, they often fail to think critically because they do not know what these criteria are to judge the quality of their thinking. The present study incorporates the theory of successful intelligence by Sternberg (1985Sternberg ( , 2001Sternberg ( , 2015 as the critical-thinking goals. The rationale of incorporating this theory is that SI allows students to think outside the box by considering beyond analytical thinking (e.g.…”

“…It proposes and develops a novel criticalthinking strategy to cultivate students' critical-thinking dispositions. The strategy incorporates several theories such as Zimmerman's (2002) self-regulated learning theory, Sternberg's (Sternberg, 1985(Sternberg, , 2001(Sternberg, , 2015 Successful Intelligence (SI) theory and Schraw's (2001) metacognitive awareness. These three theories provide key principles to explicitly teach critical-thinking: regulation of thinking, thinking with specific goals, and active monitoring of the regulation of thinking to achieve the specific goals.…”