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"Dave has a lot of trouble getting things down on paper," McKibben said of one pupil. "His main emphasis is doing things with his hands. His model of the boat was fantastic. It showed he really knew the information. If I asked him to write it down, it would have been very short." This is just the kind of application Gardner envisions: because McKibben knew that Dave understood the world in a kinesthetic way, she was better able to teach him and assess his knowledge. Dave must still learn to write well, McKibben said, but what counted here was that he showed good understanding of the material.
Yet it is possible to raise objections even to an exemplary use of Gardner's theory. Is it a better use of Dave's time to work on his writing or to express himself kinesthetically? Gardner has claimed that "all the intelligences have equal claim to priority," but historically, verbal and math skills may be stronger predictors of job performance than he allows, and employers seem to be placing a higher and higher premium on them. Then there is the problem of superficiality. How deeply can a student comprehend a given topic by relying on his strongest intelligence? Using his hands, Dave may be able to learn about the boats of the settlers, but can a kinesthetic approach help him understand central historical issues, like the reasons the Europeans came to America in the first place?
A new article by Gardner, which he regards as quite important, suggests that the problem of depth remains to be solved. In "Multiple Approaches to Understanding" (to appear next year in an anthology), he sets out to show how MI theory can be used to teach evolution and the Holocaust. He first details inviting "entry points" for these topics--students strong in interpersonal intelligence, for example, could play the roles of different species. An entry point is only that, however, and Gardner proceeds to pose the "crucial educational question": Can we use knowledge about individual strengths to convey the "core notions" of a subject? One expects Gardner to answer this question, using illustrations from his two topics. Instead, he goes off into generalities. The reader is left with no idea of how Gardner would, say, use students' interpersonal gifts to teach them the core mathematical principles of genetics.
In 1993 Gardner published Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice, a collection of articles written with colleagues at Harvard. The book is quite diffuse and unsystematic, and the samples in the projects described are very small. When TIME asked Gardner what evidence there was that MI has improved achievement in schools, there was a long pause before he answered, "The testimonials and figures are numerous enough from lots of different places to suggest it's worth taking seriously." (One such testimonial could come from Coyote Creek, which scores above the district average on standardized tests.) Gardner was saying there is plenty of anecdotal evidence in support of MI but no formal studies. This is not an irredeemable flaw, and others agree with Gardner that MI merits further investigation. "The ideas," says Robert Siegler of Carnegie Mellon University, "have enough support that it would be worthwhile implementing them on a large enough scale to find out if they work." At the moment, however, we don't know that they work.