Instructional Techniques in Cognitive Rehabilitation: A Preliminary Report

Instruction is an essential component of effective cognitive rehabilitation, which requires teaching or reteaching a variety of skills and concepts to people with compromised learning. Currently, the field lacks a cohesive set of principles to guide clinicians’ instructional behaviors. A review of the literature in related fields, in conjunction with findings in neuropsychology, reveals evidence-based principles that lead to effective instructional design and implementation. This article summarizes this work and attempts to provide clinicians with principles to guide their treatment planning when training or teaching clients with cognitive-communication disorders. KEYWORDS Acquired brain injury - memory rehabilitation - direct instruction - strategy training - errorless learning - distributed practice - spaced retrieval