University of Maryland's Hearing and Speech Sciences department to team up with athletics in traumatic brain injury research

Samuel J. LeFrak Hall, the home of the Hearing and Speech
 department at UMD.  Source: Nick Pagliarulo.

The University of Maryland's Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences is in discussions with athletics and other departments on campus on ways that they can meet clinical and research needs of people who have had concussions and mild traumatic brain injuries.

The goal in "beginning a major department-wide initiative in the area of traumatic brain injury and sports concussion" is to develop better ways of identifying children and young adults who have suffered a head or brain injury. 

It is also important to "[assess and support] those individuals who do not fully recover within the expected time frame (roughly 20 percent of cases) to return successfully to the classroom [or to work]."

A traumatic brain injury usually occurs when there is a violent blow or jolt to the head. Penetration of objects, like a bullet, can also cause a traumatic brain injury. 

A mild traumatic brain injury "may cause temporary dysfunction of brain cells," while "[m]ore serious traumatic brain injuries can result in bruising, torn tissues, bleeding and other physical damage to the brain that can result in long-term complications or death."

The leading causes of TBI in the
United States.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the leading cause of traumatic brain injury in the United States is from falls (28 percent). Struck by/against events, which include head injuries in sports, is the third leading cause of traumatic brain injury at 19 percent. 

Kristin Slawson, M.A., CCC-SLP, a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the University of Maryland, is a certified brain injury specialist who is particularly interested in the functional impact of traumatic brain injury on language and is involved in work to improve assessment and intervention for mild traumatic brain injury.

Slawson believes traumatic brain injury and sports concussion are an important matter and she is one person that has made a strong push for this area of study in athletics and other departments at the university.

Speech-language pathologists are crucial in helping head/brain injury individuals return to school or work

Speech-language pathologists "work to prevent, assess, diagnose, and treat speech, language, social communication, cognitive-communication, and swallowing disorders in children and adults."

"The Basics Everyone Should Know About TBI (Infographic)"
Source: http://www.traumaticbraininjury.net/
the-basics-everyone-should-know-about-tbi-infographic/

The average person doesn't know what a speech-language pathologist does or why they are even needed. So what would make them so qualified to work with people who have serious head or brain injuries?

Well, take this for example. When an individual with a mild traumatic brain injury or concussion visits a school's health center, those nurses and doctors are worried about that student's overall health -- their vestibular function, their diet, how much sleep they are getting, etc. 

A speech-language pathologist, on the other hand, is concerned about how this particular individual will do in the classroom and make sure that they don't fall behind in their schoolwork.

Speech-language pathologists, and also audiologists, have been involved with traumatic brain injury for years, primarily working with more severe brain injury patients in rehab and hospital settings.

Slawson believes that speech-language pathologists put their clients in the best position to succeed both in school and at work.

"I think speech pathologists, in particular, are best positioned to help individuals who have had concussions or a mild traumatic brain injury," Slawson said, "because speech pathologists are the one's that will focus on the individual's academic or job-related needs."

Slawson adds that when an speech-language pathologist works with somebody that's had a mild traumatic brain injury or concussion, one of the things that is really important to keep things as functional as possible is focusing on what that person wants to work on -- what that person perceives as their difficulties.

The ultimate goal for the speech-language pathologist is to work on the tasks the client has expressed difficult and implement strategies to overcome those struggles, so they can succeed outside the therapy room.

University of Maryland's "New Cole Field House" plans to have research, clinical work space in concussion and traumatic brain injury

UMD's Cole Field House (above) will be renovated
beginning this month.
Source: http://umdrightnow.umd.edu/sites/umdrightnow.umd.edu/
files/topiary_cole_small_cropped.jpeg

The University of Maryland has plans to renovate the university's historic Cole Field House, which used to be the home for Maryland basketball from 1955-2002. 

There is a $155 million renovation plan for the building "that will give the Terps football team an indoor facility and provide support services to the entire school."

According to the University of Maryland, "New Field Cole Field House" will be a state-of-the-art facility that intends to "contain more than 23,000 square feet of dedicated, revenue-generating clinical space and at least 16,000 square feet of research space" in areas of study like concussion and traumatic brain injury.

This groundbreaking research center will partner with the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering, School of Public Health, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, the University of Maryland, Baltimore's School of Medicine, and the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences.

The center hopes to "[advance] the discovery of innovative diagnostics and treatments, [improve] human performance through interdisciplinary research, [and serve] as an orthopedics resource for as many as 60,000 patients in the Washington, D.C., region each year."

Slawson is excited about the new Cole Field House plans, particularly as it will allow for research and clinical workspaces focusing in concussion and traumatic brain injury.

Slawson hopes that the programs they will have in "New Cole Field House" will be pivotal in getting individuals, (junior high students, high school students, college students, and adults) who have sustained a mild traumatic brain injury, back to school and back to work.

Along with research space in concussion and traumatic brain injury, the center will also have space in muscle-brain physiology and biochemistry, human physiology and performance, exoskeleton-robotic treatments, and medical biomechanics. 

The current plan for "New Cole Field House" is to begin construction in December 2015, this month. The project should be completed by June 2018.

University of Maryland working to better spread knowledge in traumatic brain injury research by collaborating with other Big Ten and Ivy League schools

The University of Maryland is part of the Big Ten/CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation)-Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration, which "is a multi-institutional research effort whose mission is to better understand the causes and effects of sports-related concussion and head injuries."

The aim of the Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration is to bring people of many perspectives (i.e., coaches, athletic trainers, scientists, and physicians) to research and investigate traumatic brain injury in sports. 

The group joined forces in June 2012 and it consists of all of the Big Ten Conference schools and all of the Ivy League schools.

Dr. Bradley D. Hatfield, chair of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland and faculty advocate of American College of Sports Medicine, is the Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration's faculty research liaison for the University of Maryland. He has been involved with the organization from the start. 

Hatfield says that it is a great opportunity for the University of Maryland to be working in the Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration with other Big Ten schools and Ivy League schools.

"The collection of universities in this group are some of the best in the world," Hatfield said. "We can share data we [Maryland] don't have in a big database with schools like the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, Penn State University, and the prestigious Ivy League schools such as, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Brown."

Functional MRI of uninjured brain and concussed brain. 
Source: http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/
HeadTrauma/36078

The greatest benefit of the Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration is the communication between the 22 institutions. All the schools will be able to pool their findings, like images of injured brains, and study them.

Hatfield mentions that the Maryland is behind the curve right now in the area of traumatic brain injury and sports concussion studies.

"Maryland has no medical school on site, so the new Cole Field House center will help with that," Hatfield said. "Maryland also hasn't hired many people that are experts in concussions."

Hatfield adds that this center will bring patients in a medically safe environment, which Maryland does not provide. 

Despite being behind the curve, with the "New Cole Field House" set to begin construction within the month, Hatfield says that the future at Maryland does look promising in the area of traumatic brain injury and sports concussion.

"It's a sunny forecast, as we are poised to move into the area of traumatic brain injury and sports concussion," Hatfield said, "but we're not at the level of activity we hope to have quite yet."

Every July, the Big Ten/CIC-Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration convenes for its annual conference. Last year, the meeting was in Philadelphia; this year, it's in Chicago. 

Final Task 2: Your Info/Data and Video

1. Explanatory Headline:

• University of Maryland's Hearing and Speech Science department to begin research in the area of TBI and sports concussion

2. Explanatory Sub-Heads:

• Clinical work is crucial to developing better ways of identifying children and young adults who have suffered a brain or head injury
• This section will discuss what exactly goes into clinical sessions at the Hearing and Speech Clinic in LeFrak Hall and the clinician-patient relationship during those therapy sessions. It also will talk about assessing and supporting those clients who don't fully recover within the expected time frame to return successfully to the classroom.
• People with TBI/sports concussions may have speech and/or language deficits, so a speech-language pathologist's job in this case would be to evaluate and assess cognitive-communication skills and swallowing abilities. (Source)
• Possible contact: Kristin Slawson, University of Maryland, Hearing and Speech Sciences
• UMD working to better spread knowledge in TBI research by collaborating with other Big 10, Ivy League Communication Sciences/Disorders departments 
• This section will discuss the efforts of UMD and other Big 10 schools and Ivy League schools in understanding the causes and effects of traumatic brain injuries and sports concussions. (Source)
• Possible contact: Dr. Bradley D. Hatfield, University of Maryland, Kinesiology 

3. Video interview here: 

1. How is the HESP department implementing this area of study into their major/grad program?
2. What kind of treatments/activities will help clients with TBI/sports concussions in clinical sessions? Why?
3. What exactly is the Big 10/CIC-Ivy League Traumatic Brain Injury Research Collaboration working on in regards to TBI/sports concussion?

Social media users tend to not share opinions about political issues on social networking sites due to fear of taking the opposing view and being isolated

Students learn better in virtual reality environments with narrated presentation, but their learning is not affected by high levels of immersion, study says

A study conducted at the University of California in Santa Barbara called "Learning Science in Virtual Reality Multimedia Environments: Role of Methods and Media," by Roxana Moreno and Richard E. Mayer, found that students learned better with a narrated presentation rather than an on-screen text presentation.

Source: http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/
Psychology/images/VR.jpg

The students scored higher on retention, transfer, and program ratings in the narrative condition, and the narrative and text condition than in the text condition, the study said.

The 2002 study also found high ratings of presence in high-immersion environments. However, this high level of engagement, or involvement, did not affect students' performance on retention, transfer, or program ratings, the study said.

A brief overview of the study

The participants (college students at the University of California in Santa Barbara) in the study learned about botany through a multimedia game.

The researchers "developed a version of Design-A-Plant...that was delivered using a head-mounted display (HMD) and earphones. In the game, the students would travel to a made-up planet that had certain climate conditions. They had to create a plant that would be able to survive on the planet.

The students received feedback through a spoken explanation, an identical on-screen explanation, or both a spoken and identical on-screen explanation.

For example, a medium gives instructions asking "the student to design the roots that are

appropriate for those conditions." The medium then "gives feedback on students’ choice of the root."

In the experiment, students received the spoken or identical on-screen explanations via media, including a desktop display, a HMD while sitting, or a HMD while walking. The explanations were presented as just narration, just text, or both narration and text, while at a desktop display or using a HMD.

A) Desktop display, B) semi-immersive environment (HMD while sitting),
C) high-immersive environment (HMD while walking). Source:
journal.frontiersin.org

Learning was measured by retention, transfer, and program rating. Moreno and Mayer define these three factors:

• retention -> "students...write down all they can remember about the kind of roots, stems, and leaves"
• transfer -> "students...solve problems they have not previously encountered"
• program rating -> "students...rate their ease of learning and other features of their learning task"

Moreno and Mayer also define immersion:

• immersion -> "the extent to which computer displays are capable of delivering an inclusive, extensive, surrounding, and vivid illusion of reality to the senses of a human participant"

Narrative presentation, and narrative and text presentation is more effective and efficient for students' learning than text presentation.

Source: http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/
wp-content/uploads/2009/01/mayer-graph-audio2.jpg

The researchers predicted before experimentation that the students would learn "more deeply when words were presented as narration rather than as on-screen text. The findings from the experiment supported this hypothesis. 

The researchers mentioned that this finding was "consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning." This theory suggests that "visual information...can become overloaded when it must process incoming graphics and printed text."

The graph on the right shows us that "[l]earners can only process one thing visually at a time. If they're reading the text, they can't look at the graphics simultaneously. However, presenting the text as audio narration let's learners process it with their ears, and frees their eyes to focus on the graphic being explained."

Therefore, students have "better retention [and] achieve better transfer when material...when material is communicated by speech rather than on-screen text."

Media (e.g., desktop display, head-mounted display) has an effect on presence, but it does not affect students' learning.

The researchers predicted before experimentation that the students would either have "better retention, transfer, and rating scores for high-immersion environment than for low-immersion environment" or "poorer retention, transfer, and rating scores for high-immersion environment than for low-immersion environment."

The thought by the researchers, here, was that "students who learn in more immersive conditions are predicted to give higher presence ratings (i.e., highest ratings for [HMD while walking] followed by [HMD while sitting] and lowest ratings for [desktop display])." As a result, "the higher sense of presence could cause students to work harder to learn the material [hence]...high scores on retention, transfer, and program ratings.

On the other hand, "[a]n alternative version of this view is that learners will give higher ratings on presence to more immersive learning conditions but that...highly immersive environments may overload the learner."

As a result, the study showed that there was an effect on presence. The researchers mentioned that students had strong feelings of "being there" in the more immersive environments, like a head-mounted display, rather than in less immersive environments, such as a desktop display, but the higher levels of engagement did not increase or decrease learning, proving both hypotheses wrong.

Students performed equally well receiving narration presentation in both high- and low-immersion environments. 

The researchers also predicted before experimentation that the students would have "better retention, transfer, and rating performance...with narration than...with on-screen text in high-immersion environment but not in low-immersion environment." The findings from the experiment did not support this hypothesis. 

The researchers found that narration presentation, and narration and text presentation was more effective and efficient than text presentation for desktop display and head-mounted display.

"Apparently, the methods we used—such as the use of narration rather than text—were supported equally well in the high- and low-immersion environments," the researchers wrote.

They did find that there wasn't much of a difference between the narration presentation, and the narration and text presentation. The researchers interpreted this as students being more "inclined to attend to the narration alone because of the experiential mode of virtual reality environments."

Limitations in the study

The researchers mention that there is little research out there on this topic. They concluded, though, that their study was "limited by the nature of the learning materials, by participants’ familiarity with the technology, and by the quality of the [virtual reality] experiences."

The researchers also pointed out that "[i]n the future, it is more likely to expect learning differences as a function of immersion as people gain familiarity with these newer technologies." They say that   "[m]ore research is needed to explore the circumstances under which presence may enhance learning."

Cowboys acquire RB Christine Michael from the Seattle Seahawks

This is the type of information I would share because 1.) I'm a big sports fan -- I'm always tweeting about sports -- and 2.) I specifically chose the Dallas Cowboys because they're my favorite football team.