¶ … Executive Function Performance Test (EFPT) for healthcare practitioners who deal with mild and moderate-severity stroke patients. Executive function is important to overall health because it allows us to regulate our actions, plan our behavior, and set goals. Stroke patients frequently suffer from executive-function related losses; this study proposes a measure that will help quantify the extent of executive function loss. The design of this study was a basic experimental 3x1 design. The authors compared three groups on their performance of the EFPT. The three groups were: mild stroke, moderate stroke, and age-matched control (no stroke). All participants performed the EFPT and stroke group participants were tested 6 months after the stroke event to allow for an even amount of healing time.

The EFPT is noticeably different from other performance-based measures because unlike the Kitchen Task Assessment (its closest relative), it records cues from experimenters that support patient performance. Support cues may be offered as physical assistance or as verbal requests for assistance. Also, unlike other popular instruments that measure performance of day-to-day tasks, the EFPT formalizes this record of support cues as progressive -- just...

This introduces a necessary element of realism to the measure. Especially with recovering stroke patients, the amount of help offered and accepted can be a critical distinction between different levels of post-stroke healing. The EFPT is better suited to accommodating people with motor impairment, whether or not they are stroke survivors, because those individuals routinely ask for and receive assistance with daily tasks.
The independent variables in this study were stroke condition (mild, moderate, or none), gender, age, education (years) and race (African-American or White). Two levels of dependent variable were described in this study: actual EFPT tasks (Cooking, Using Telephone, Medicine, and Paying Bills) and EF 'Components' (Initiation, Organization, Sequencing, Safety and Judgment, and Completion). Participants' scores were computed according to both sets of variables. The task variables were operationalized as the sum of scored/coded items during each task. The components variables were operationalized as the sum of items coded according to each component. Actions and events…