Howard Gardner

The John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education
Adjunct Professor of Psychology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Profile

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also holds positions as adjunct professor of psychology at Harvard University, adjunct professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and senior director of Harvard Project Zero. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award in Education, and in 2000, he received a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has received honorary degrees from 20 colleges and universities, including institutions in Ireland, Italy, and Israel. In 2004, he was named an honorary professor at East China Normal University in Shanghai. The author of over 20 books translated into 23 languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. During the past two decades, he and colleagues at Project Zero have been working on the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and assessment; and the nature of interdisciplinary efforts in education. In recent years, in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has embarked on a study of Good Work—work that is at once excellent in quality and also socially responsible (goodworkproject.org). He is also beginning to investigate the nature of trust in contemporary society.

Degrees

• Ph.D., Harvard University