Howard Earl Gardner (born July 11, 1943) is an American developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University. He was a founding member of Harvard Project Zero in 1967 and held leadership roles at that research center from 1972 to 2023. Since 1995, he has been the co-director of The Good Project.
Gardner has written hundreds of research articles and over thirty books that have been translated into over thirty languages. He is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, as outlined in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
Gardner retired from teaching in 2019. In 2020, he published his intellectual memoir A Synthesizing Mind. He continues his research and writing, including several blogs.
Howard Earl Gardner was born July 11, 1943, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Ralph Gardner and Hilde (née Weilheimer) Gardner, German-Jewish immigrants who fled Germany in 1938 just prior to World War II.
Gardner described himself as "a studious child who gained much pleasure from playing the piano". He taught piano intermittently from 1958 to 1969.
Howard Gardner had a brother named Eric who died at age seven in a sledding accident just before Howard's birth. Gardner often reflects on his childhood, his overall Jewish values and the tragic loss of his brother, whom he never got the opportunity to meet. As a young child Gardner enjoyed reading and playing the piano.
While his parents had hoped that he would attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, Gardner opted to attend a school closer to his hometown in Pennsylvania, Wyoming Seminary.
Gardner graduated from Harvard College with highest honors in 1965 with a B.A. in Social Relations, and studied under the renowned Erik Erikson. After spending one year at the London School of Economics, where he studied Philosophy and Sociology, he went on to obtain his Ph.D. in developmental psychology at Harvard while working with psychologists Roger Brown and Jerome Bruner, and philosopher Nelson Goodman.
Gardner also attended the Boston University Aphasia Research Center, where he completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship from 1971-1972.
For his postdoctoral fellowship, Gardner worked alongside neurologist Norman Geschwind and continued his work there for another 20 years. In 1986, Gardner became a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has been the Chair of the Project Zero Steering Committee since 1995, and was the Co- Director for Project Zero from 1972- 2000. Gardner has also been Senior Director of the Project Zero Committee since 2000. Gardner is also a part time lecturer at Harvard University in the field of Psychology. Gardner is the John H. and the Elizabeth A. Hobbs Tutor at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University (Arizona State University, 2022).
Since 1995, much of the focus of his work has been on The GoodWork Project, now part of a larger initiative known as The Good Project that encourages excellence, ethics, and engagement in work, digital life, and civic society.
In 2000, Gardner, Kurt Fischer, and their colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education established the master's degree program in Mind, Brain, and Education. This program was thought to be the first of its kind around the world. Many universities in both the United States and abroad have since developed similar programs. Since then, Gardner has published books on a number of topics including Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds, Five Minds for the Future, Truth, Beauty and Goodness Reframed, and The App Generation (written with Katie Davis).
Since 2012, Gardner has been co-directing a major study of higher education in the United States with Wendy Fischman and several other colleagues. Information about the study, including several dozen blogs, is available on Gardner's website. In March 2022, MIT Press published Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner's book The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is and What It Can Be.
At the start of 2024, Gardner was the most cited Educational Scholar in the United States, according to the Edu-Scholar Public Influence Ratings.
In 2024, Teachers College Press published two collections of Gardner’s papers: The Essential Howard Gardner on Education and The Essential Howard Gardner on Mind.
According to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, humans have several different ways of processing information, and these ways are relatively independent of one another. The theory is a critique of the standard intelligence theory, which emphasizes the correlation among abilities, as well as traditional measures like IQ tests that typically only account for linguistic, logical, and spatial abilities. Since 1999, Gardner has identified eight intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. Gardner and colleagues have also considered two additional intelligences, existential and pedagogical. Many teachers, school administrators, and special educators have been inspired by Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences.
Gardner's definition of intelligence has been met with some criticism in education circles as well as in the field of psychology. Perhaps the strongest and most enduring critique of his theory of multiple intelligences centers on its lack of empirical evidence, much of which points to a single construct of intelligence called "g". Gardner has responded that his theory is based entirely on empirical evidence as opposed to experimental evidence, as he does not believe experimental evidence in itself can yield a theoretical synthesis.
Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences can be seen as both a departure from and a continuation of the 20th century's work on the subject of human intelligence. Other prominent psychologists whose contributions variously developed or expanded the field of study include Charles Spearman, Louis Thurstone, Edward Thorndike, and Robert Sternberg.