J.P. Guilford

In the 1950s J.P. Guilford, following the model of factor analysis, created his three-factor structure of the intellect, commonly known as SOI. In his cubic model there are three separate factors that make up any intellectual activity. Operations are the things that an individual does, such as remembering and thinking creatively; contents are the things that the individual works with and performs his operations on, such as words, sounds, or body language; and products are the ways in which information is organized, such as single items, groups of items, or a generalization to new situations.

There are five operations, five contents, and six products. This page [http://home.gci.net/~innob/HTML/SOI.html] has good definitions of the subcomponents of the intellect. There are 150 possible combinations of these factors (one of each) which can be diagramed in a cube (see p. 434 in the Psychology textbook by Benjamin, Hopkins, and Nation). For example, something that tests convergent production on semantic relations would be like a multiple-choice test that asks the person to find the best word to complete the sentence. See here [http://www.lincoln.ac.nz/educ/tip/55.htm] for a few good examples.

Many people, such as psychologist Mary Meeker, have produced tests that use his theory of intelligence to be used in helping students. Through these tests, students are able to identify more easily their strengths and weaknesses, and are able to strengthen them. However, the task of identifying all 150 parts of the intellect and creating and administering a test for them can be overbearing. Even Guilford had not finished describing all of the combinations in his theory of the intellect before his death.