Structure of Intellect by Guilford

Guilford's
Structure of the Intellect

Sidharth P

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• J. P. Guilford was a psychologist involved during the World War II in developing tests to select candidates for training as pilots.

• As he expanded his interests into testing various other specific thinking skills, he developed a model to guide his research and to organize his thinking about all the various skills he was testing.

• His "Structure of Intellect" model organized these various abilities along three dimensions: content, product, and process(operations).

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Guilford identified 5 operations, 5 contents and 6 products.

• Thus the maximum number of factors in terms of the different possible combinations of these dimensions will be 5x5x6 = 150.

• Later he divided memory into two parts and the total dimensions became 180.
  

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Content: (Contents – the terms in which we think)

• By content he meant that different people seemed to pay more attention to and to think more effectively about different kinds of information, such as:

• Visual

• Auditory

• Symbolic

• Semantic

• Behavioral

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Content: (Contents – the terms in which we think)

• Visual

  • Information perceived through senses directly or from imaging

  • (Concrete, real-world information)

• Auditory

  • Information perceived through hearing; (It consists of language,

    speech, sounds, music and words)

** Earlier both Visual and Auditory was classified as one category called "Figural"

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Content: (Contents – the terms in which we think)

• Symbolic

  • Information perceived as symbols or signs that stand for something else items such as words and symbols which generally convey some meaning

  • (Symbolic: e.g., Arabic numerals, the letters of an alphabet, or musical and scientific notations - It is composed of letters, digits, and other conventional signs.)

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Content: (Contents – the terms in which we think)

• Semantic

  • It is in the forms of verbal meanings or ideas which we get from others.

  • Semantic meanings often, but not always, associated with words

  • Semantic - Concerned with verbal meaning and ideas.

  • Generally considered to be abstract in nature

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Content: (Contents – the terms in which we think)

• Behavioral

  • Information perceived as acts of people.

  • Information about the mental states and behavior of observed individuals.

  • It means social behaviour in society.

  • Daniel Goleman (1995) has popularized this as “social intelligence”.

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• An artist might excel at processing visual information, but be poor at processing words, numbers and other symbolic content.

• A researcher, who excels at processing symbolic content such as words and numbers and semantic meaning, might be very poor at processing behavioral data and thus relate poorly with people.

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Products: (Products – the ideas we come up with.)

• The products dimension relates to the kinds of information we process from the content types

• Units

• Classes

• Relations

• Systems

• Transformations

• Implications

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Products: (Products – the ideas we come up with.)

• Units

  • refer to the ability to perceive units in a content area.

  • This might be symbolic units such as words, visual units such as shapes, or behavioral units such as facial expressions.

  • Understanding the meaning of words, visual, auditory and symbolic units

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Products: (Products – the ideas we come up with.)

• Classes

  • refer to the ability to organize units into meaningful groups and to sort units into the right groups.

  • It means classification of words and ideas

• Relations

  • pertain to the ability to sense the relationships between pairs of units.

  • It implies discovering relations of words and ideas

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Products: (Products – the ideas we come up with.)

• Systems

  • consist of the relationships among more than two units

  • The ability to structure objects in space and to structure symbolic elements and to formulate problems.

• Transformations

  • The ability to understand changes in information, such as

    rotation of visual figures, or jokes and puns in the semantic area.

  • The ability to look into the future lines of development or to suggest changes in the existing situations

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Products: (Products – the ideas we come up with.)

• Implications

  • refer to expectation.

  • Given a certain set of information, one might expect certain other information to be true.

  • The ability to utilize present information for future ends

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• With the two dimensions of content and product we can sort out all the kinds of information people can think about.

• People can talk about the implications of a symbolic series, the relationship of two sounds, or behavioral transformations such as changes in emotions.

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Operations (Operations – the act of thinking)

• The operations dimension describes what the brain does with and to these types of information:

• Cognition

• Memory

• Divergent production

• Convergent Production

• Evaluation

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Operations (Operations – the act of thinking)

• Cognition

  • It has to do with the ability to perceive various items.

  • For example, the cognition of semantic units has to do with one's ability to recognize words, i.e. one's vocabulary.

  • Cognition of Behavioral Transformations would be the ability to perceive changes in the expressions of an individual.

  • Cognition - The ability to understand, comprehend, discover, and become aware of information - It refers to discovery, rediscovery or recognition

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Operations (Operations – the act of thinking)

• Memory

  • It has to do with the ability to store describes.

  • People differ in their abilities to remember not only from other people, but also among various kinds of information.

  • Some people who are poor at remembering faces (behavioral units) may be excellent at remembering puns ; semantic transformation.

  • Memory recording - The ability to encode information;

  • Memory retention - The ability to recall information

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Operations (Operations – the act of thinking)

• Divergent production

  • It has to do with the ability to access memory.

  • It refers to the ability to find large numbers of things which fit certain simple criteria.

  • For example, the ability to divergently produce visual units includes the ability to list a great many images which include a circle.

  • Divergence in behavioral transformations would include the ability to revise stories about people.

  • Divergence in Symbolic Implications would include the ability to list various equations which can be deduced from given equations.

  • The ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem; creativity - This is thinking in different directions, seeking and searching some variety and novelty

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Operations (Operations – the act of thinking)

• Convergent Production

  • It is the search of memory for the single answer to a question or situation.

  • This area includes most areas of logic type problem solving.

  • It differs from divergence in the constraint of one right answer.

  • Associated most often with IQ.

  • The ability to deduce a single solution to a problem; rule-following or problem-solving - This type of thinking, by reasoning, results in useful solution to problems

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Operations (Operations – the act of thinking)

• Evaluation

  • It is the ability to make judgments about the various kinds of information judgments such as which items are identical in some way,

  • which items are better, and what qualities are shared by various items.

  • The ability to judge whether or not information is accurate, consistent, or valid

  • It is reaching decisions or making judgments about information

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Example:

• A child is asked to determine the day of the week on a particular date with the help of a calendar.

• The task involves operations like convergent production , memory and cognition.

• In carrying out theses operations, he has to make use of the contents.

• In this particular case, he will make use of semantics, i.e. reading and understanding of the printed words and figures indicating days and dates of a particular month in the calendar.

• By carrying out mental operations with the help of the contents he will finally arrive at the products.

• The day of the week to which the date is, represents the factor knows as ‘relations’.

Open Ended

Eg: stopping your car at red signal

Content:

Operation:

Product

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Eg: stopping your car at red signal

  Content: symbolic

  Operation: cognition, memory, convergent production

  Product: relations

Open Ended

Eg: seeing the boy/girl you have a crush on winking at you

Content:

Operation:

Product

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Eg: seeing the boy/girl you have a crush on winking at you

  Content: Visual

  Operation: cognition, memory, divergent production , evaluation

  Product: transformations, implications

Open Ended

Eg: saying "present" when the teacher is taking attendance

Content:

Operation:

Product

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Eg: saying "present" when the teacher is taking attendance

  Content: Figural (Auditory)

  Operation: cognition, memory, convergent production

  Product: Units

Open Ended

Eg: seeing dark clouds in summer

Content:

Operation:

Product

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Eg: seeing dark clouds in summer

  Content: Visual

  Operation: cognition, memory, evaluation

  Product: Implications

Open Ended

Eg: when you see this image

Content:

Operation:

Product

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

• Eg: when you see this image

  Content: visual

  Operation: cognition, memory, divergent thinking

  Product: transformations

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

Educational Implication and relevance of SI Model:

• This theory about the idea that the brain of a child is like a computer, who acquires, stores and uses information.

• It provides knowledge about the specific ability of the students to guide them in the right direction.

• SI Model is useful in finding out the reasons of the unsatisfactory performance of the students in spite of their adequate intelligence.

• This model points out that for understanding higher mental processes like thinking some drastic modifications could be needed in our curriculum or method of instruction.

• This model has explored 150 intellectual abilities and this enables us to find out whether we are paying sufficient attention to each one of them or not and if not how to improve.

Guilford's Structure of the Intellect

Educational Implication and relevance of SI Model:

• This model guides us to device enrichment programmes for the gifted children.

• It stresses that learning of specific skills should be our focus of attention.

• SI Model is very useful in constructing tests of various types for different age groups.

• This concept of Guildford will prove useful in our future research in the areas of learning, memory, problem-solving etc.

• This model discovered many abilities which were not known before.

• It is very useful for vocational training.