biology

The Boston process approach

The Boston process approach is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Boston process approach rather than just read about it. In short: The Boston Process Approach is a neurological assessment tool developed by Edith Kaplan and her colleagues, Harold Goodglass, Nelson Butters, Laird Cermak, and Norman Geschwind at the Boston Veterans Medical Center. The main purpose of the Boston Process Approach is to assess brain damage as well as cognitive impairments in patients through a series of tests that are related to memory, attention, intelligence, and o…

Key takeaways

The Boston process approach belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Boston process approach to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Boston process approach from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Boston Process Approach is a neurological assessment tool developed by Edith Kaplan and her colleagues, Harold Goodglass, Nelson Butters, Laird Cermak, and Norman Geschwind at the Boston Veterans Medical Center. The main purpose of the Boston Process Approach is to assess brain damage as well as cognitive impairments in patients through a series of tests that are related to memory, attention, intelligence, and other aspects of information processing. This approach is one of the more flexible and qualitative neurological assessments because it emphasizes how a patient performs a task instead of whether they succeeded or failed at it.

Administration In order to start this procedure, the neuropsychologist first looks at the participant’s behaviors and what kind of complications they may have. Based on the given information, the person performs a standardized test. While the participant is performing the test, the neuropsychologist examines how they are answering each question. The neuropsychologist scrutinizes the process to see if there are any intellectual problems exhibited. Alterations can be made to the test by simply adding, or lessening the time the person has to complete the test. After using the Boston process approach, the clinician looks at the outcomes to make conclusions on what is going on in the brain. These conclusions are based on the errors that occurred during the test. The point of looking at the errors is to see what issues may have occurred when trying to process the information and answer the question in order to evaluate the specific deficit(s). Certain inaccuracies may infer that there’s damage to a definite part of the brain, like speech difficulties implicating the speech area in the left hemisphere.

Qualitative analysis The qualitative analysis focuses on closely observing the process by which a patient arrives at a final answer. An example of qualitative analysis is in regard to the Block design test, which measures spatial visualization ability and motor skills. During the task the patient is asked to recreate a viewed pattern by arranging a set of blocks that have colored patterns on each side, The examiner observes the method by which the patient approaches and solves the problem, focusing, for example, on what quadrant the patient started at, which hand was used to arrange the blocks, whether the patient rotated the blocks on the table or had to lift them into space, if the image produced was either a mirror image or reversal of the pattern that the patient was supposed to create, and which side the patient made more errors on. This is considered qualitative analysis because it focuses on how the patient came to their final design, rather than the final design itself.

Modifications The modifications made to standardized tests can include repetition of test questions and allowing more time than allotted in the standardized version. Many standardized tests have been subject to process-based modifications. There are many types of modifications that have been created for the battery approach, but not all of them are listed. Some of the main modifications are listed below:

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Revised as a Neuropsychological Instrument (WAIS-R NI) Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV) Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised (WMS-R) California Verbal Learning Test (CVLT) Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF) Consonant Trigrams Test Boston Naming Test (BNT) Judgment of Line Orientation (JLO) Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT4) Stroop Task Weiner, MF; Hynan, LS; Rossetti, H; Falkowski, J (2011). "Luria's three-step test: what is it and what does it tell us?". Int Psychogeriatr. 23 (10): 1602–6. doi:10.1017/S1041610211000767. PMC 3399685. PMID 21554794. Geriatric Evaluation of Mental Status

Interpretation The Boston process approach is known to be a flexible battery approach when assessing brain function of a person, meaning that there can be many different standardized tests that can be administered to the individual depending on their existing deficiencies. Data interpretation from this approach does not necessarily look at the final score on the tests, rather it focuses on what kind of errors were made by the individual during the assessment. Results from the Boston process approach allow the clinician to make inferences about what brain areas may not be working properly in the individual. The clinician can then also make inferences about how severe the damage to the brain is by determining whether there is low-level or higher-level deficits in their cognitive processing.

Critiques A major criticism of this approach is on its external validity. The problems occur due to differences in outcome between administrators. There have also been issues in regards to the lack of consistent patterns and methods for each diagnosis (Milberg & Hebben, 2013). This neuropsychological flexible battery approach allows for administrators to choose which tests they want to use, however, it makes room for the lack of consistency in choosing the tests for each type of neurological issue. Accordingly, there are questions about the empirical validity of the Boston Process Approach. With that being said, the Boston Process Approach revolutionized the field of clinical psychology and is still widely used today (Milberg & Hebben, 2013).

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Boston process approach

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Boston process approach claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Boston process approach before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Boston process approach ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Boston process approach

In research: The Boston process approach appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Boston process approach in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Boston process approach is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Neuropsychological assessment, Neuropsychology, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Boston process approach outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Boston process approach in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Boston process approach means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain The Boston process approach out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is The Boston process approach in simple terms?

Why does The Boston process approach matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Boston process approach?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Boston process approach.