ASSESSMENT PRACTICES OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE PATHOLOGISTS FOR COGNITIVE COMMUNICATION IMPAIRMENT AFTER TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY

Background of the Study: The aim of the present research was to examine the assessment practices of Speech-Language Pathologists for Cognitive Communication Disorders after Traumatic Brain Injury. Methodology: It was a cross-sectional survey method, a convenient sampling technique. Research was carried out from January 2021 to June 2021. The sample size was n=21, out of which n= 9 (42.8%) participants, each from Rawalpindi and Islamabad n= 3 (14.4%) participants from Lahore filled in their responses. Medium; being Online, the questionnaire was distributed either through email, WhatsApp or Facebook MessengerApp. SLPs who were undergraduates or who had no experience working with TBI clients were excluded. Questionnaire included 12 items. Responses of research participants were recorded using Google Forms and presented in the form of n (%). The data were analyzed using descriptive analysis, and chi-square analysis was performed to confirm the association between settings, city of practice and years of experience through Statistical Package of Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 22.0. Results: Speech-Language Pathologists reported that they routinely assessed (62% each) Receptive and Expressive communication. However; less than half of the participants routinely evaluated domains like verbal pragmatic skills (43.3%), functional communication (33.3%) and phonemic awareness (33.3%). SLPs assessed their clients by employing tests like MoCA (55.62%), Quick Aphasia Battery (18.75%), Cognitive Assessment (LOTCA Protocol) (14.35%) and a combination of Formal (48%) and Informal (52%) clinical interviews. Conclusion: Informal discourse assessment is incorporated more frequently as compared to informal discourse evaluation in assessment practices of Speech-Language pathologists of Pakistan for cognitive communication impairment followed by traumatic brain injury.

Construction Methods for Edge-Antimagic Labelings of Graphs

A labeling of a graph is a mapping that carries some set of graph elements into numbers (usually positive integers). An (a, d)-edge-antimagic total labeling of a graph, with p vertices and q edges, is a one-to-one mapping that takes the vertices and edges into the integers 1, 2, . . . , p + q, so that the sums of the label on the edges and the labels of their end vertices form an arithmetic progression starting at a and having difference d. Such a labeling is called super if the p smallest possible labels appear at the vertices. This thesis deals with the existence of super (a, d)-edge-antimagic total labelings of regular graphs and disconnected graphs. We prove that every even regular graph and every odd regular graph, with a 1- factor, admits a super (a, 1)-edge-antimagic total labeling. We study the super (a, 2)- edge-antimagic total labelings of disconnected graphs and present some necessary conditions for the existence of (a, d)-edge-antimagic total labelings for d even. The thesis is also devoted to the study of edge-antimagicness of trees. We use the connection between graceful labelings and edge-antimagic labelings for generating large classes of edge-antimagic total trees from smaller graceful trees.