Best Practice

How our culture and background influence our view of ‘intelligence’

How we define talent and intelligence can vary depending on our culture and background, but how often do we take this into account as teachers and across schools? Sanjo Jeffrey considers why and how we should…


The narrow definition of the words like gifted, talented and intelligent automatically omit students who are linguistically and culturally diverse (LCD), those from groups identified as Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME), and those with certain sensory and physical limitations. This is cause for concern.


Views of intelligence

Determining a student’s giftedness and talent is usually based on the intelligence criterion and often assessed via intelligence quotient (IQ) tests.

Interestingly, the societies that use these instruments are diverse and have multiple groups with unique qualities. These “one size fits all” IQ tests are to the detriment of diverse groups because intelligence has a cultural context.

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