Assessing learning capabilities during cognitive and perceptual evaluations for adults with traumatic brain injury

Occupational therapists (OTs) typically identify cognitive and perceptual deficits in adults with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) through a combination of Activity of Daily Living (ADL) evaluations and cognitive/perceptual skill evaluations which provide information about clients' occupational performance and cognitive/ perceptual skill levels, respectively. These evaluations do not provide information about clients' abilities to learn new approaches to tasks or to transfer learning from one task to another. Since learning ability is an important determinant of clients' response to treatment, OTs need to evaluate that ability as part of their routine ADL and cognitive/perceptual evaluations. This paper presents a learning process approach to cognitive/perceptual evaluation that identifies ways OTs can evaluate clients' learning abilities with only slight modification of current evaluation practices.