Effects of intensity of reading short stories activites anretelling the story on elderly cognitive impairment

Introduction: Minimizing the risk of cognitive decline in the elderly can be done by developing the brain activity, one of them is by reading the story and retelling the story again, but little attention has been paid to the intensity of reading short stories and retelling the story against cognitive impairment in the elderly. Objective: This study aimed to determine the effect of the intensity of reading short story activities and retelling the story on the elderly cognitive impairment Method: This was a pre-experimental study with one group pre and post-test design. The sample was determined using the purposive sampling technique, with total sampe was 14 respondents who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The independent variable was a reading short story and retelling the story, the dependent variable was the cognitive function. The data were collected using MMSE questionnaires and analyzed using the Wilcoxon test (α<0,005). Results: The result indicated a therapeutic effect of reading short story activities and retelling the story on the increase of elderly cognitive function (p=0.001). Most respondent experienced an increase in cognitive function in the aspects of material recall which is equal to +1.15. Conclusion: Reading short story and retelling the story activities can be used as an intervention to improve the cognitive function of elderly. Future research is needed to confirm this study and qualitatively assesed the benefits of this study.