The followup that is required to be able to use this after stroke. What area of damage would require use of Errorless learning rather than learning from your errors? A very simple question that will never be answered under the current stroke non leadership.
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=159464&CultureCode=en
Do people learn from their mistakes? This question is often a subject
of discussion at rehabilitation centres. For people with memory
problems preventing mistakes is a better learning strategy.
Neuropsychologist Dirk Bertens has now demonstrated that ‘errorless
learning’ also works with people with non-congenital brain damage. He
will be awarded a PhD for his research by Radboud University on 8
January 2016.
A significant proportion of people with brain damage that has been
caused by a stroke or accident suffer from disrupted executive
functions: for them, actions that consist of several steps and require
planning are difficult. That causes problems because virtually all of
our everyday actions consist of several steps, even holding a normal
conversation. Such patients therefore receive training to relearn these
everyday tasks.
Errorless-learning doves
In ‘errorless learning’ you prevent
mistakes from occurring by dividing the target to be achieved into steps
and explaining those with extensive descriptions, examples, visual
instructions and especially pauses in between the steps. Errorless
learning originates from research into doves. The American psychologist
Herbert Terrace taught doves to peck at a red button but not a green
one. As the task was slowly made more complex – first the doves only
learned the difference between the colours red and green and then the
difference between the red and the green button – the doves rarely made
mistakes in the last, most difficult task.
Beekeeping and Internet banking
In people the principle has so
far been investigated among individuals with memory disorders, such as
dementia, and for them it appears to be a successful approach.
Dirk Bertens investigated the effect of the training on sixty people
with non-congenital brain damage who had problems with planning. The
participants were allowed to choose two everyday tasks to train on.
Bertens: “They chose tasks such as Internet banking or making lasagne.
One participant was a beekeeper and chose to practise investigating his
beehives and subsequently filling in a report. So that is what we did.”
Neuropsychologist Dirk Bertens during the inspection of one of the participant’s beehives.
Error versus errorless
Half of the group received a ‘standard’
trial-and-error training and the other half practised with an errorless
learning method. Whereas the first group were given the space to make
errors and to subsequently correct these, the second group received
extensive instructions both before and during the realisation of the
task. “We briefly paused between each intermediate step to check if
things were still going well. The participants found it particularly
difficult to pause for such an evaluation moment. However, after eight
training sessions they realised the tasks better than the participants
in the control group.”
Both the trainers and the participants saw a clear improvement after
the errorless training sessions. “I would like to implement the
principle of errorless learning in rehabilitation centres throughout
the Netherlands,” says Bertens. “With this implementation it can be
examined whether there are even more patient groups who could benefit
from this approach, for example individuals with congenital learning
disorders or learning disabilities.”
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