ASSBI launches new website and Association Software.

After a lot of work and late nights from the VERY patient and hard-working Michael Sugg of Advance Web Design, our previous Webmaster Mike Hennessey, and myself ASSBI are proud to announce the launch of the new website from Wild Apricot. Obviously there will be some teething problems at first but all of us here at ASSBI hope you like the new set up.

We encourage you to go and have a look around, sign into the website (whether or not you are a member of ASSBI). Signing in will give you the opportunity to update your own information. We would also like to collect stats such as your discipline and where you come from to get a better idea of our community.

If you are a member of ASSBI Margaret will send you an email with your new membership ID number. You will also be able to set your own password and update your details.

When your membership is due you will, as usual, receive a reminder email with links to renew.  You can still renew online but we cannot take online payments just yet, so for the time being you can transfer your fees via the bank OR ring Margaret who will take payment over the phone.

We have imported a lot of data from CVENT but some people have not been transferred over for a number of reasons – they had opted out, email address’ had bounced or they had multiple cards. So if you know someone who didn’t get this email please ask them to go to the new site and sign up for the newsletter.

From now on Margaret will be our Webmaster so if you have anything you wish to go on or have any feedback please email her.

Margaret Eagers, Webmaster!

Do people with severe traumatic brain injury benefit from making errors? A randomized controlled trial of error-based and errorless learning. 

What the study is about

Individuals who have sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI) often need to relearn a lot of skills they had previously mastered. There is some disagreement as to the best strategy to relearn these skills, however, one method that has been successful is ‘errorless learning’. Errorless learning refers to teaching the skill without ever allowing for errors to occur. The training session is designed in a way that requires the trainer to prompt with the correct response, rather than allowing the trainee to guess, and therefore risk laying down the memory of the error response. Learning in this method is often very specific and skills do not often generalise to other situations where the skill is needed outside of the training session. Error-based learning on the other hand involves structured feedback on performance (e.g., use of videos), graded prompts, and post-task reflection to teach how to anticipate errors, check for and correct errors, and generate strategies for overcoming those errors. This ‘metacognitive’ method has previously been shown to reduce errors on trained tasks, increase self-regulation and self-awareness, however, it was previously not known if this approach would promote greater generalisation of skills than errorless learning. This study aimed to determine this.

What we did

Fifty-four individuals with a severe traumatic brain injury were randomised either to the errorless learning group OR to the error-based learning group. They received 8 x 1.5 hour individual training sessions focused on meal preparation. The success of training was measured by total errors made during the Cooking Task (a standardised test of error self-regulation), as well as measure of broader generalisation (Zoo map test) and a number of other secondary outcome measures.

What we have found

After accounting for initial performance and level of pre-injury education, individuals in the error-based learning group demonstrated significantly fewer errors on the Cooking Task following training when compared to those in the errorless learning group. Those who received the error-based training strategies also demonstrated greater levels of self-awareness and behavioural competency at completion. Forty-one participants were re-tested 6 months following completion of training. There were no significant differences in social and vocational outcomes at this point. Results from this study demonstrate that having structured opportunities to make errors and learn to correct these plays an important role in the learning of skills during rehabilitation after severe traumatic brain injury.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the willing volunteers who participated in this research. The research would also not have been possible without funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Registration is now open for the 41st Conference in Adelaide click HERE to find out more about the conference

TASIT AND TASIT-S

We are proud to announce that The TASIT has been improved and the 3rd Edition is now available through ASSBI.

Also there is a Short 20 minute TASIT called TASSIT-S available to buy

for more information & to order Click here...

The 41st ASSBI Conference will be held in Adelaide, South Australia on the 3-5th May 2018.

More information will be released soon. In the meantime here are some important dates for your diary.

Conference Programme and Registration – 1^st December 2017
Early bird closes – 1^st April 2018
Conference closes - 28^th April 2018
Workshops – 8.30am 3^rd May 2018
Welcome Reception – 7.00pm 3^rd May 2018
Conference starts – 8.30am 4^th May 2018
Conference dinner – 7.00pm 4^th May 2018
Conference concludes – 5.00pm 5^th May 2018 

FOR MORE INFORMATION CLICK HERE...