... Intelligence therefore is a term that is vague yet flexible and has many characteristics. (Source: I. Roth 1990) Nowadays it is widely accepted that intelligence is a 'general cognitive ability' (i.e. capacity), but this is still far to vague a definition to be useful in measuring it. Binet and Simon (1905) raised the issue that intelligence's generality is a problem: "Almost all the phenomena that occupy psychology are phenomena of intelligence..... Should we put all of psychology in the tests?" (Binet and Simon, 1905; Quoted in Wolf, 1973, p.178) There are 3 major approaches to intelligence: the psychometric approach, the information processing approach and the developmental approach. The psychometric approach, as the name infers, focuses on the measurement of intelligence. Psychometrics takes a practical approach to intelligence, but the definition of intelligence it uses- "that which is measured by IQ tests" - is flawed in that it does not avoid the problem ...

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