A Clinical Guide to Enhance Learning in People with Alzheimer’s
Disease (PwAD) (Recorded Webinar)
Presented by Carrie Ciro
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This course is a recording of a previously hosted live webinar event. Polling and question submission features are not available for this recording. Format and structure may differ from standard MedBridge courses. Have you struggled to teach people with Alzheimer's disease (PwAD) new or old tasks pertinent to their health care? In this class, we unfold the mystery of how to teach PwAD activities important for their quality of life and safety. By understanding their brain strengths at each stage, you can successfully choose the right training paradigms, interventions, and recall supports across home, inpatient, and outpatient settings.
Meet your instructor
Carrie Ciro
Dr. Carrie Ciro is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Oklahoma. She has over 20 years of clinical experience working with adults/older adults in a variety of settings, including skilled nursing, home health, and hospital care. Additionally, she has 20 years of…
Chapters & learning objectives
1. Linking Brain Strengths with Types of Learning Possible Across the Continuum of AD
While AD can vary in presentation person to person, the disease pathology is similar across AD stages. In this chapter, the health care professional will learn the pathological changes in the brain viewed in terms of limitations and remaining strengths, and link these changes to the types of learning possible. Armed with this knowledge, health care professionals can choose interventions that match brain strengths.
2. Overview of a Dementia Educational Model for Teaching PwAD
Applying the right educational model when training people with any type of deficit is critical to permanent learning. Yet health care curriculums spend little time on how and why we should teach differently to people with diverse cognitive abilities. In this chapter, we share the outline for an educational model that can be used across diagnoses, with an emphasis on models that support training PwAD.
3. Choosing Your Learning Paradigm and Intervention
At what stages in the disease process can PwAD correct and learn from training errors? Should our training expectations shift from providing cues only at recall (e.g., Do you remember how we put on your shirt yesterday?), to strategic cues at both input and recall? In this chapter, we explore the training paradigms of errorless learning, effortful processing, and dual-cognitive support, and how each can be used at different stages of training for PwAD.
4. Choosing Your Encoding Training
Researchers and frontline health care providers continue to explore and debate the value of cognitive training. Ultimately, the answer may lie in the PwAD’s capacity for “generalization,” or learning one task and applying it to another. Capacity for generalization may align with residual cognitive ability. In this chapter, we will review the evidence for cognitive training in PwAD and provide recommendations for use.
5. Choosing Your Recall Strategies
Task-specific training has enjoyed a resurgence in research and practice across diagnostic categories, in part due to our understanding of what impacts neuroplasticity in the injured brain. Task-specific training relies on the strength of procedural memory and relies less on the capacity for generalization. This chapter will teach the health care professional how to structure task-specific training across the AD continuum.
6. Choosing Your Training Variables
What techniques are most successful in “encoding” information during health care training? Repetition is highly favorable, but HOW you structure the repetition can look different. In this chapter, we explore 1) spaced retrieval techniques, e.g., having the PwAD learn and recall learning at spaced time intervals, and 2) blocked practice, e.g., repetitive practice of a task within a specific period. Evidence supporting each in PwAD will be presented so that the health care professional can make deliberate decisions for encoding support in training.
7. Utilizing the Dementia Educational Model to Provide Client-Centered Care for PwAD
Once you train a PwAD to perform a task, how do you facilitate them recalling it later? Once memory is even mildy impaired, recall supports ARE effective. In this chapter, we explore evidence-based internal and external supports that PwAD can use to recall training, that are easy to apply across severity of dementia.
8. Utilizing the Dementia Educational Model to Provide Client-Centered Care for PwAD: Question and Answer
In this chapter, we will use case vignettes to test your application of this content across severity of dementia, across health care settings/professions, and across the types of tasks needing training.