Presentation
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Merging Research and Education Through an Undergraduate Laboratory Course Involving Aphasia Assessment and Student Projects Using the Lesion Method
Poster A21 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Also presenting in Poster Slam A, Thursday, October 6, 10:00 - 10:15 am EDT, Regency Ballroom
Julie Fiez1, Corrine Durisko1, Erin Duricy1, August Vincent1, Kailee Lear1, Eva Brady1; 1University of Pittsburgh
As part of a National Science Foundation grant, we have designed and implemented an undergraduate laboratory course on the neuropsychology of brain injury. This course serves as the primary source of data collection for a project using the lesion method to study the neural basis of numeracy and its connection to the language network. In the interest of making the course materials and resources freely available to others, we describe its basic structure and provide evidence of its effectiveness. Overall, the course has a flipped structure, with reading and video tutorials providing the information necessary to complete homework assignments that prepare students to apply their knowledge “hands-on” during class time. In the first part of the course, students work in pairs to learn how to administer and score a 3-hour battery that involves a variety of speech, language, and numeracy assessments with high fidelity. Following training, each student pair completes and scores a proctored assessment session with a research participant who has a focal lesion due to stroke, with participants drawn from a research registry of over 3,000 stroke survivors (the Western Pennsylvania Patient Registry). In the second part of the course, students learn how to develop and test a hypothesis involving the lesion method, using a course database with results from 48 prior participants. To learn the component skills, students work individually during class to operationalize and test a prototype hypothesis focused on the importance of Broca’s area for speech production. Interestingly, students obtain different statistical results due to differences in how they operationalize the hypothesis about Broca’s area (e.g., how they define Broca’s area, which measure of speech production they choose from the prior testing, and if they include a covariate such as lesion volume, participate age, or years of education in their analysis). This creates a rich opportunity to discuss issues related to interpreting statistical results with respect to the hypothesis being tested and the current literature. In parallel, students work in teams to develop and test a hypothesis of their choice based on the previously collected data (48 participants). In the last part of the course, the students’ effort culminates in a poster that is presented to the class. The course has been successfully offered for five terms with a variety of instructional formats (in-person, hybrid, completely online) and a typical enrollment of 24 students. After the first term, the neuropsychological assessment battery was successfully migrated to an exclusively online administration format, which creates considerable geographic flexibility. In terms of research effectiveness, to date all but one of 54 student pairs successfully completed the testing battery, including cases in which the research participant had significant impairments due to the stroke. In terms of instructional effectiveness, across terms students have given the course excellent ratings, with frequent open-ended comments that note the uniqueness of the course and its importance to their career goals. We conclude that this course can serve as a platform for authentic data collection while also providing an exciting and unusual educational opportunity.
Topic Areas: Methods, Disorders: Acquired