Robert Sternberg Quotations

Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.

But in any case, I did poorly on the tests and so, in the first three years of school, I had teachers who thought I was stupid and when people think you're stupid, they have low expectations for you.

There is no recipe to be a great teacher, that's what is unique about them.

In other words, the better they did on the IQ test, the worse they did on the practical test and the better they did on the practical tests, the worse they did on the IQ test.

Well, first of all, we did lots of studies where we show practical intelligence doesn't correlate with G. We have probably two dozen studies that practical intelligence better predicts job success than IQ.

In other words, if a teacher only teaches in one way, then they conclude that the kids who can't learn well that way don't have the ability, when, in fact, it may be that the way the teacher's teaching is not a particularly good match to the way those kids learn.

And in order to succeed in later life, you need creative skills because look at how fast the world is changing.

And if we don't have a test, what we may end up doing is going back to what this country has done before. We could use social class and we still do, but in the 50s, it was, do you have the right last name and are your parents in privileged positions?

The three parts of the theory are analytical ability, the ability to analyze things to judge, to criticize. Creative, the ability to create, to invent and discover and practical, the ability to apply and use what you know.

If you're not adapting to the very rapidly changing environment, if you can't think creatively, you lose big in this society because there are very few jobs for you left.

So, for example, if a child is labeled as having a learning disability, it has very concrete consequences for the kinds of services and potentially accommodations that child will get.

ACT and SAT each have their own parts of the country. The GRE has its lock on graduate admissions. And so, one could blame the companies, but really, economically, they have no incentive to change things very much because they're getting the business.

The problem is that there are very few technologies that essentially haven't changed for 60, 70 years.

I've taught statistics, math courses and what I've found is that often if you teach them algebraically the formulas, you'll have one group of kids doing well.

And so, you can do hundreds and hundreds of studies showing a general factor and just so long as you restrict your populations, your testing materials and the kinds of situations you look at, you can keep finding the same wrong thing again and again.

But what many psychologists have done, probably because they did well on a test themselves and everyone wants high self esteem, is to create this little box and then do their research inside it.

If there's going to be an SAT, it's probably practical to invest in a book or perhaps in a course, but I'm sorry to say, I went to some classes that my kids took and it was clear in school that what they were doing was just SAT training.

If you bore them to death and say, this hurts me more than it hurts you, #A, they're not going to believe it, and #B, they're going to invest their time in other things anyway.

In other words, unlike some people with new theories, we will go out, we'll go into a school and we get products and the products are evaluated, whether it's by teachers or others. The scores are quantified and then we compare performances.

To the Kenyan families, school doesn't really matter because none of them are going on to college. Almost all of drop out of school and so, they're spending their time learning things that are important to them.

Well, I don't think that the SAT is a scam.

All of the studies we do in my group are quantified.

When I grew up, there were no computers that anyone used, except for the big scientists. There was no internet, there were no VCRs.

Leadership and civic engagement are an important part of the Tufts education, ... People often get themselves into power who are very bright, but not necessarily wise, and maybe even foolish.

capitalize on their strengths, but also to correct and compensate for their weaknesses.

If Tufts doesn't work out, my safety is to go back to Yale, where I used to teach.

Our goal is to get better students and send a message that these things really matter. The great students will get in, anyway. This is about the middle.

Research has shown that IQ type tests account for about 10% of the variation in how successful people are in various aspects of their adult lives.

Teachers can't afford not to be flexible. The world is changing quickly. Don't just teach to those who think and learn analytically.

develop leaders of the next generation, and not necessarily CEOs and presidents.

A principal in Oregon was having problems with some girls in the school. The girls had just started to wear lipstick and were pressing their lips against the mirror. After a few weeks, when the culprits were caught, the principal wanted to teach them a lesson, so the custodian showed them what he had to do to clean the lipstick. He dipped the sponge into the toilet and proceeded to wipe the mirror. Needless to say, the girls never pressed their lips against that mirror again.

This is a really exciting team to be part of.

The first is, what our studies show is that if kids learn creatively and practically, they learn better, even if the tests are for memory.

I'm more of a creative learner, ... I do very well in projects, but I was not good at memorizing all of that material in the introductory courses.

You can quickly go from having passion and love to passion and hate when an act of betrayal happens.

The world supports a multi-million dollar industry of intelligence and ability research, but it devotes virtually nothing to determine why this intelligence is squandered by engaging in amazing, breathtaking acts of stupidity.

Current intelligence-testing practices require examinees to answer but not to pose questions. In requiring only the answering of questions, these tests are missing a vital half of intelligence- the asking of questions...

I had planned to be a psychology major, but I bombed introductory psychology.

Success in life does not necessarily originate with academic success.

There was already a famous Sternberg in psychology and it was obvious there would not be another.

The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly.