Intelligence is one of the most important objects of study in Psychology since its evaluation began to be considered in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

This is a capacity that every animal has to some degree. Its definition is by no means simple, and has often involved breaking it down into more discrete and quantifiable dimensions.

However, the construct of intelligence has been conditioned by skills that are mostly academic in nature, ignoring other valuable expressions (such as creativity or cognitive flexibility).

In this article we will present a theoretical model aimed at exploring the way in which human beings develop creative productions, for which classical intelligence is just one more factor: the model of the three rings of Renzulli .

Model of the three rings of Renzulli

Joseph Renzulli is a professor of Educational Psychology in Connecticut (USA), and has dedicated much of his professional career to the study of people with high abilities. That is why he is considered one of the great authorities on the subject worldwide, being also the director of the National Research Center on Gifted and Talented. The theory of the three rings is one of his most recognized contributions.

This relevant author considers that high capacities cannot be understood as a stable dimension or feature, that is, as an attribute whose expression in a given subject is manifested in a regular and unchanging way. Likewise, he rejects the idea that it is a phenomenon that can be reduced to its psychometric properties, emphasizing that it underlies the interaction of other factors that can be enhanced with the appropriate pedagogical resources.

For this reason, underlined the concept of gifted behaviours as a way of acting that can happen in all individuals under concrete conditions and in certain moments of life. In this same sense, he proposed that an educational macro-system aimed at stimulating grass-roots dimensions would promote a highly gifted decision-making process, not only among students, but also in the general population.

Renzulli recognizes intelligence as a complex, multifaceted construct, made up of both practical and creative, analytical skills. However, he points out that aptitude is not a simple sum of all of them, but that it also needs a specific mode of management, regardless of the level at which they are presented in a given individual.

His studies on the issue, which have spanned decades, have concluded that this endowment (giftedness) is expressed in two qualitatively different ways. Moreover, it involves the harmonious convergence of three dimensions (or rings): high skills, creativity and commitment to the task . In the following we will proceed to detail all these issues, in order to shed light on the interesting model of Renzulli’s three rings.

Two types of Giftedness

Renzulli and his team conceived of two types of talented or “gifted” people (a term that has no exact equivalent in Spanish): academics and productive creatives.

He considered that both were important, and that they could often be closely related and could be significantly improved through appropriate training, this being the most elementary purpose of his proposal (over and above classification or identification).

1. Academic Talents

Those who have this form of talent show intelligence related to the solution of demands that are deployed in school or university environments , and which can be accurately measured by the use of standardised procedures (WISC, for example). For this reason, it is the type of equipment most frequently detected in general. The identification of a high IQ would imply a special educational need that would have to be addressed with the design of curricular adaptations.

There is a close association between this particular type of intelligence and high academic results, since it starts from a theoretical model in which it is conceived as the adaptation to this particular type of environment. However, it does not necessarily have to be related to success in other areas of life, including personal and work life. Thus, it is an aptitude that is not necessarily generalised, nor does it result in an excess of information when it is understood separately.

2. Creative and productive talents

The intelligence of highly creative people, contrary to the previous assumption, is not represented in the classical assessment tests (designed according to the skills of the academic curriculum). These are individuals who are internally motivated for the development of their personal achievements , and who also tend to be inspiring for others.

It therefore describes all forms of action whose priority is to develop original ideas, innovative solutions and genuine products; whose conception contemplates an impact on one’s own life and that of others. It implies the abandonment of conventional paths through which success is expected to be achieved, in order to explore inhospitable (and not always evident at first sight) paths through which yields of high personal and social value will be obtained.

The three rings

Renzulli’s three-ring theory explores the constitutive dimensions of the second of the above-mentioned talents, the productive creative, based on the interaction between the subject and his environment. All of them are variables that can be strengthened through specific procedures, with the exception of the first one, which is rooted in genetic and neurodevelopmental aspects.

Next we proceed to describe the characteristics of each of the rings that make up this theoretical model.

1. High Skills

High skills can be understood in two ways. The first describes the accentuated presence of traits whose effect is either transversal (such as general intelligence) or more specific (mathematics, reading, etc.); while the second refers to the particular way in which all these skills are expressed in everyday life, in situations other than the controlled context of school assessment tests (generalization).

The author of this model understood as high skills the capacity (or potentiality) to execute a concrete task (which required a specific cognitive domain), at least, over the 80-85 percentile (in contrast to the reference group). This is a way of quantifying, in operational terms, what performance would be necessary to be considered as optimally functioning (considering that these are skill sets that can be quantified with a traditional psychometric method).

Despite the fact that these types of abilities are closely associated with achievements that are highly relevant in school age, the literature on this issue indicates that they do not effectively predict the achievement of goals of greater social or personal relevance in adult life. In fact, classic works on this topic find that such skills only explain 10% of the variance in total (average) job performance.

2. Commitment to the task

This dimension refers to the way in which the person feels motivated to carry out a specific task, showing perseverance and dedicating time to its development . It is associated with other variables, such as self-efficacy, which describes the perceived ability to successfully carry out a particular activity. In this case, the motivation that emerges is purely internal, so that the behavior is maintained without the need for it to be followed by external incentives.

Internal or intrinsic motivation stimulates the fundamental need to feel useful, so it is directly related to self-efficacy itself and the generation of positive feelings such as self-satisfaction and competence. This degree of involvement has also been associated with a state of flow, that is, the fusion between thought and action that leads to the performance of a meaningful task in a deeply attentive and fluid manner.

3. Creativity

Creativity can be understood as the recourse to an original thought that allows to approach the structural aspects of the problem that is approached , so that the solutions are not limited to affect its surface, but to establish cognitive or behavioral alternatives from which a product of greater efficiency or effectiveness is derived. In many cases, it is a deliberately naive approach, devoid of conventionality, which harbours a constructive and innovative power.

In this way, creativity can be expressed as a questioning of the established, so that the discourse that is articulated before the decision making process is built on transversal and divergent approaches. The result of a creative thought usually supposes a qualitative impact on the advance of the disciplines in which it is deployed, opening new paths that with time are incorporated to the normative acquis of its base procedures.

Gifted Behavior

Creative and productive talents, as can be seen, also require high skills in the conventional cognitive domains. For this reason, they are the exact point where conventional intelligence converges with creativity and high task oriented motivation, two dimensions that are particularly susceptible to training. Thus, giftedness is far from the classical psychometric criterion (two standard deviations from the average of population intelligence, which was equivalent to a gross score of 130).

Therefore, it would be possible to reinforce motivation and creativity by resorting to specific methods from which every person could carry out , under favourable conditions, a gifted behaviour. In conclusion, high endowment would not be a stable trait, but an attitude or disposition that could fluctuate over time, and on which the responsibility of the professionals participating in the education system falls.

Bibliographic references:

  • Renzuli, J. (2005). The Three Ring Conception of Giftedness: A Developmental Model for Promoting Creative Productivity. In Reis, S.M. (Ed.) Reflections on Gifted Education, 55-86. Waco: Prufrock Press.
  • Renzulli, J. y Gaesser, A. (2014). A Multi Criteria System for the Identification of High Achieving and Creative/Productive Giftedness. Revista de Educación, 368, 96-131.