This text based course is a transcript of the live webinar titiled, "Executive Function Assessment", presented by Timothy J. Wolf, OTD, MSCI, OTR/L
>> Timothy Wolf: The title of my assessment is broadly titled, “Executive Function Assessment.” and to get started, I would like to go over a few objectives for what I want to cover here in the next hour.
Objectives
The first thing, and this will take probably the majority of our time, is comparing and contrasting methods that are currently being used to assess executive function. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list. It is to give you an overview of what is being done out in practice, which professionals are administering them, and what are some of the similarities and differences between them. You may or may not be familiar with all of them, and that is quite all right because there are quite a few that are out there. There are also a lot of very good measures that we will not cover today as well. I hope no one is offended if a measure that you like really well is not on this list.
I do want to preface this talk by saying that my work and this talk in particular is geared toward adults. I know that there is a lot interest in assessing executive function in children, but that has not been an area of my expertise. Adults seem to be where executive function assessment is employed right now. That is where the content of this talk will go.
Plus, I should point out that while I know the majority of you are probably OTs, there may be some of you in here who are not. This is presented from an OT slant, because that is my background and training, that is what I have done and so that is how the talk has been organized as well.
I use the following terms interchangeably throughout my talk. When I say traditional laboratory assessments, I am really talking about neuropsychological assessment. That does not mean that all of these are done exclusively by neuropsychologists. A lot of them are and a lot of them have been developed by neuropsychologists, and there are some that are very interdisciplinary that we will talk about as well.
I am then going to talk more about performance-based assessments. This is where we get more into the OT assessments that are out there, but there are also some neuropsychological performance-based assessments that are available as well. After I cover both methodologies, I will talk some about mixed method assessment which is really what we use now in research and practice where I work here at Washington University.
