Use of Elaborative Encoding To Facilitate Verbal Learning after Adolescent Traumatic Brain Injury

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effectiveness of elaborative encoding in learning and remembering word definitions after traumatic brain injury (TBI). DESIGN: Two case studies. SETTING: University outpatient clinic. PARTICIPANTS: Two adolescents with severe memory impairments after TBI who needed specific vocabulary for school. INTERVENTIONS: A series of individual speech-language therapy sessions incorporating clinician- and subject-generated strategies to facilitate elaborative encoding. Target words were based on school requirements and pretreatment test results and were assigned randomly to treatment or control groups. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Accuracy of free-recalled definitions at the conclusion of therapy and after 1 month with no therapy. RESULTS: Significant improvement in expressed word knowledge at the conclusion of therapy, with improvement on treated words maintained at 1 month for both subjects. CONCLUSIONS: Elaborative encoding was an effective tool for teaching specific information required for school. Patterns of response differed substantially from those of normally developing children. Generalization to classroom use was planned for and should be measured in future research.