Howard Earl Gardner (born July 11, 1943 in Scranton, Pennsylvania) is an American psychologist who is based at Harvard University. He is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences.
Howard Gardner entered Harvard in 1961 with the intention of majoring in history, but he changed his field of interest after encountering cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner and the writing of Jean Piaget. After finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1971 with a disseration on style sensitivity in children, Gardner continued to work at Harvard, establishing with Nelson Goodman a research team on arts education known as Project Zero.
Multiple intelligences is an idea that maintains there exist many different types of "intelligences" ascribed to human beings. In response to the question of whether or not measures of intelligence are scientific, Gardner suggests that each individual manifests varying levels of different intelligences, and thus each person has a unique "cognitive profile." The theory was first laid out in Gardner's 1983 book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, and has been further refined in subsequent years. In 1999 Gardner lists seven intelligences as linguistic, logic-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily kinaesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal.
In 1981, Howard Gardner was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship. He is Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and adjunct professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. Currently, he is the Jacob J. Javitz Visiting Professor at Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University.
