The intellectual skills are the basic skills of active learning, understanding of information, verbal expression, critical judgment, organization of information, mathematical reasoning and problem solving. They also allow us to deliver production reports, correct texts, drive a vehicle to carry out food distribution, make the financial balance of a company or promote the purchase of a product in a commercial establishment, among many other tasks.
Skills are not unique to one person or group of workers. Not a task, not an occupation profile. Each skill can be present in countless occupational activities that share it. As for example, the ability to organize information, the same applies to the archivist, the secretary, the librarian or the messenger, among many other occupations; while the capacity for verbal expression, the speaker, the salesperson, the commentator, as well as the manager who presents their projects in a work meeting.
Four intellectual aptitudes have been assessed:
- Spatial aptitude: indicates the capacity with which a person can mentally imagine the movements of the figures in space (rotate them, adjust them…).
- Numerical aptitude: it is the aptitude that is manifested by the speed and security in the mental calculation, the mastery of mathematical concepts, the arithmetic reasoning and the resolution of numerical problems of everyday life.
- Abstract reasoning: refers to the ability to solve logical or abstract problems and discover and follow logical sequences.
- Verbal aptitude: it is the ability to understand ideas and concepts expressed in words and reason with them. It is also related to the richness of vocabulary.
The four intellectual skills can be grouped as follows:
- Spatial aptitude and abstract reasoning form Non-verbal Intelligence that represents the ability to reason with non-verbal content, without cultural content. It reflects your perceptual, analytical and logical capacity.
- Verbal and number skills build verbal intelligence. The score obtained can indicate the cultural or acquired intellectual level, that is, fundamentally your ability to handle and understand words and numbers. The global result allows obtaining an evaluation of general intelligence, understanding as such the current ability to solve problems of different types in an agile way and perform tasks that require complex mental operations.
Creative thinking (having innovative ideas), analytical thinking (evaluating whether those ideas are feasible to carry out and finding effective solutions to problems), and practical thinking (applying ideas effectively) are in balance, and this is what you should try to teach school, know how and when to use each of them.
