Abstract

Academic Intelligence(AI) and Practical Intelligence(PI) differ in that the former is, in general, relevant to the problem solving in academic setting whereas the latter is relevant to problem solving of real life. Especially, for the university students, the importance of PI is critical in that they are at the merge of entering society and leaving school The present study tried to identify what are the differences and similarities between the structure of AI and PI, and which characteristics AI and PI have. Through a pretest with 202 university students, 93 sentences showing typical characteristics of AI and 102 sentences showing typical characteristics of PI were selected. Then 434 university students were asked to measure how each sentence carries the characteristics of people with high AI and high PI, respectively. Results showed that university students, especially seniors, evaluated PI more importantly than AI. Also, the correlations between AI and PI were low, and a series of analyses showed that two concepts of intelligences were unidentical in that each concept has different characteristics or main factors. The meanings and the applications of the results revealed in the presents study were discussed.