Discussion 4: Cognitive abilities of aging adults

One of the most important and most studied aspects of aging is cognitive functioning; that is, intelligence, learning, and memory. These are critical to an individual’s performance in every aspect of life, including work and leisure activities, social relationships, and productive roles. Aging adults who have problems in cognitive functioning will eventually experience stress in these other areas as well, along with an increasing incongruence between their competence levels and the demands of the environment. When discussing the cognitive changes experienced by aging adults, there is a tendency to speak of declines with aging, but there is growing evidence of gains as well.

For your post in this discussion, select two activities from your reading that you believe impact the gains of cognitive abilities of aging adults. Provide a clear description of each activity and how you believe it impacts the cognitive abilities of aging adults. Then respond to the following:

As a human service and public service leader, how could you facilitate these activities with the aging adult, family, and community?

What additional information from your experiences and reading could you provide that relates to the impact of these activities?

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.