| Seguin started his career as assistant to the eminent physician Jean Itard. In 1798, there had come to Itard's attention a wild boy found by some hunters in the forest of Aveyron. Itard had attempted to civilize the boy, but abandoned the project because he felt the boy was an idiot or an imbecile and that little could be done for him in the way of training. Seguin continued to work with the boy because he felt the gains made, even though slight, made the boy happier and better
adjusted. He then devoted himself to the training of retarded children and was eventually put in charge of a school for the mentally retarded in 1837. The first institution of its kind, it served as a beginning for other training schools in France and the United States for the education of the mentally
handicapped. In 1848. Seguin migrated to the United States, where he originated sense and muscle training techniques whereby retarded children were given intensive exercise in sensory discriminations and in the development of muscle control. In 1866, he developed a test. now known as the Seguin Form Board. It was originally devised in conjunction with his program for training the mentally retarded. Basically the test consists of 10 pieces of wood of various geometric forms that are removed from their slots in the board by the examiner and stacked in a standard arrangement. The subject is instructed to put the blocks back in their spaces as quickly as possible. It is employed now as one of the subtests in the Arthur Point Scale of Performance Intelligence. The significance of Seguin's test is that it was the first to be used as some measure of intellectual
functioning. |
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