Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Is school "all VCI"?

I've read here and elsewhere that school mostly taps into the verbal reasoning (measured by VCI on the WISC) rather than non-verbal reasoning (PRI).

Can anyone add some nuance to this statement?

-Ul.H.

Somewhat depends on how big mostly is supposed to be. Even though written and verbal communication are at the root of material presentation, learning is a question of what goes on in the mind of the student. Patterns, causality, relations, even extracting theories can all be more heavily drawn from nonverbal reasoning. Certain subjects like science are going to be more strongly conveyed when supported by nonverbal presentations, which is one of the nice side effects of theories of mutliple intelligences.

I would think it would very much depend on the type of school your child attends... IB, Montessori, Steiner, traditional American, etc.

All the indexes matter and are called on in different ways. But if I was goin to say school was "All X" it would be PSI & WMI, though really I don see that as any more useful a thing to say than "it's all VCI".

the book "Upside Down Brilliance: The Visual Spatial Learner" talks more about this. So much in school depends on sequencing and steps and organization, for instance writing an essay. And then of course "showing work" to prove you know and can explain the steps.

It depends but there does appear to be evidence for this tendency in the social as opposed to the hard STEM sciences. Don't have the links but other threads have covered this.

From my perspective, schools are largely VCI. Art and STEM schools are less so. Music can go either way. Classical music seems to have more sequentialness to it than art or say more popular music or what usually happens with self-taught musicians such as The Beatles, Clapton, Bee Gees, and many, many others.

Ian Stewart has written about the distinct lack of visual mathematics in school curriculums and how they're still largely based on arithmetic and haven't caught up with the research that's come out within the last 20-30+ years or so.

Sir Ken Robinson is quite a vocal educator who has been saying that schools are too VCI and not creative/visually inclined enough for the 21st century and a digital society; George Lucas has made this case too and supports this argument with his Edutopia site, but then he is dyslexic and became one of the wealthiest/greatest filmmakers in US history - ditto for Spielberg.

As Blackcat has said, Dr. Linda Silverman's book, Upside Down Brilliance, makes the case that school is primarily based on auditory sequential thinking. I tend to agree with her. Dr. Howard Gardner agrees that schools tend to be more auditory-sequential and verbal-reasoning (reading, writing), but offers his multiple intelligence theory - which Silverman says is too confusing and difficult to put into practice. More recently, Scott Barry Kaufman has also said that schools tent to focus too much on auditory-sequential and social linguistic learning and has criticized Gardner and his theories too.

Interesting question. I think school does emphasize VCI more, because so many subjects involve writing, even science. The other thing I notice is that a student who is very strong in writing, like my DD, gets a lot of natural opportunities to work at her level (eg, DD writes longer, better, and more involved work than other kids when given a writing assignment). No one has to do anything for this to happen. She makes it happen herself.