Ursula Bailey and colleagues examined developmental changes in children’s comprehension of complex stories shown as television shows. They wanted to assess whether the comprehension of stories by children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) changed in the same way as the comprehension of stories by children without ADHD, and whether the comprehension of stories was affected by potentially distracting materials when the children were exposed to the story. The researchers showed 48 children with a diagnosis of ADHD (medication free for previous 24 hours) and 65 comparison peers the TV stories (13-min Rugrats episodes) when they were about 8½ years old and again when they were about 10¼ and under two conditions: while the children had toys available or when no toys were available., After the children viewed the stories, experimenters asked them to recount the story and then to answer questions about the story.
Continue reading ‘Story comprehension in children with ADHD’
Tag Archive for 'ADHD'
Via a post by “Sixty-Five” at Life Begins at Sixty-Five, I learned of an article by Alex Witchel in the New York Times featuring the famous chef, Jamie Oliver. The 35-year-old Mr. Oliver has been a one-person juggernaut in the world of cuisine. Mr. Witchel’s story is about Mr. Oliver going to a metropolitan area in West Virginia (US) noted for the high rates of obesity among its populace; there he will promote the pleasures of home-cooked food.
As Sixty-Five noted, an interesting subtext to the story is Mr. Oliver’s schooling experiences. Mr. Oliver’s success comes against a back drop of Learning Disabilities. Here’s a snippet from the Times article to illustrate:
Continue reading ‘Stick to your pans’
Over on Twitter, friend of LD Blog Liz Ditz retweeted this:
RT @Includekidswdis: Stop, Think, Do a program by Lindy Petersen http://is.gd/1FQ0h which can really help children with #ADHD
I took a quick look and immediately remembered the work of Bonnie Camp and her colleagues (especially Mary Ann Bash) during the previous millennium. Dr. Camp and her group developed, researched, and refined methods for teaching children with learning and behavior problems, including attention deficit disorders, to manage their behavior. The Think Aloud program was at the forefront of the cog-mod mania that swept through child clinical psychology and special education in the 70s and 80s.
THINK ALOUD is a psychoeducational training progtam designed to enhance social and cognitive problem solving skills for increasing prosocial behavior and decreasing impulsivity. Much of the program content was chosen to correct cognitive deficits displayed by young aggressive boys. (1,2) Research on verbal mediation indicated that before internal controls could be established, many children needed first to establish effective control by verbalizing aloud then fading to a silent level. The Think Aloud Program was designed to teach children a problem solving process (including problem identificaton, generation of alternative solutions, predicting consequences and evaluating outcomes), how to verbalize aloud, how to apply this process in both cognitive and social situations, then move to silent direction and control of behavior. The original research with the program was conducted in two controlled trials and one refresher program with pairs of 6-8 year old boys rated as hyperaggressive by their teachers. (3,4,7,8,9,12) The manual for this program, along with details of research findings, is presented in Think Aloud: Small Group Program (11).
The numerals in the quote are footnotes (not surprisingly). They refer to only a few of the dozens of sources Dr. Camp provides.
Although it is a bit rough as a Web site, Dr. Camp has created an Internet site for Think Aloud. It features citations for those sources as well as some of the original materials. In addition, she has made some new materials for the program available as downloads.
Link to the Think Aloud site.
Sphere: Related ContentChristie Walcott and colleagues reported that children whom preschool teachers rated as having attention problems had lower scores later on phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid naming. Here’s the abstract.
Objective: The link between significant attention problems and reading difficulties among school-age children is clear, but few have examined the impact of early inattention on preliteracy development. This longitudinal study examines this link. Method: A total of 47 children had repeated measures of teacher-rated attention problems and three key preliteracy skills (phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid naming) in both preschool and kindergarten. Results: Teacher-reported attention problems in preschool significantly and negatively predicted both phonemic awareness and letter naming scores 1 year later, even after controlling for initial language ability and preschool performance on these tasks. Levels of preschool inattention did not significantly predict rapid automatic naming 1 year later. Likewise, preschool preliteracy scores did not predict attention problems in kindergarten. Conclusion: Early attention problems may interfere with the acquisition of certain preliteracy skills. Implications of these findings and directions for future research are presented.
Walcott, C. M., Scheemaker, A., & Bielski, K. (2009). Research brief: A longitudinal investigation of inattention and preliteracy development. Journal of Attention Disorders, 13, [online first, so no page numbers yet]. doi:10.1177/1087054709333330
Sphere: Related ContentWriting in Pediatrics Richard M. Scheffler and colleagues reported that elementary-aged children who took medication for ADHD had higher mathematics and reading scores than their unmedicated peers with ADHD. The research team identified individuals in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten Class data set whose parents repeatedly reported that they had been diagnosed with ADHD and compared the achievement data for those children with ADHD whose parents said their child had taken medication to the achievement of those children with ADHD whose parents said their child had not taken medication. The scores of the children who had taken medication were about two or three tenths of a school year higher than those of the children who had not taken medication.
Although these findings extend the scientific understanding of psychopharmacologic treatment of ADHD, it is important to note that they are essentially correlational, not experimental. Although the study is very well done (uses a good data set, sophisitcated statistical analysis, etc.), the children were not randomly assigned to medication and non-medication conditions. It is possible that (a) some other factors explain why some children were or were not medicated, and that other factor may be the cause of the differences in achievement or (b) that children who had higher achievement were simply less likely to be medicated.
Here’s the abstract:
Continue reading ‘ADHD meds and academic achievement’
Tara Parker-Pope of the New York (NY) Times reported on some of the challenges facing students with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder when they change from high-school student to college student. This is an important concern, and Ms. Parker-Pope raises important aspects of it.
The transition from high school to college is tough for most students. But for those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, university life poses a host of academic, medical and personal challenges. Students with A.D.H.D. struggle to stay focused on their studies and to meet the organizational demands of schoolwork.
Although some children appear to outgrow the disorder as they age, doctors say that as many as two-thirds have symptoms that persist into adulthood.
Individuals with ADHD sometimes also have Learning Disabilities. Approximately 5% of the school-age population has been diagnosed as having ADHD alone and another 4% have both ADHD and LD, according to a report of a large-scale study reported by Pastor and Reuben (2008). Those individuals have co-morbid (as the phrase goes) LD and ADHD may benefit from some of the resources assembled by the National Joint Committee on Learning Disabilities (NJCLD), which conducted a symposium about transition in 2008.
Link to Ms. Parker-Pope’s 14 April 2009 article. Learn about the NJCLD symposium entitled, “Transition to Higher Education for Students with Learning Disabilities: Building Effective Partnerships and Resources” (30 May 2008) by visiting the NJCLD section of LDOnline. Remember to review the resources available from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sources:
Pastor, P. N., & Reuben, C. A. (2008). Diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and learning disability, United States, 2004–2006: Data from the National Health Interview Survey. Hyattsville, MD: US Department of Health and Human Services, publication no. (PHS 2008-1565, vital and health statistics; series 10, no. 237). [download PDF]
Sphere: Related ContentTara Parker-Pope provided a brief overview of alternatives to medication in the treatment of ADHD in a column for the New York Times of 17 Jun 2008. Under the headline, “Weighing Nondrug Options for A.D.H.D.,” Ms. Parker-Pope briefly reviewed concerns about drugs and described several alternatives. In her discussion of St. John’s Wort, echinacea, ginkgo biloba, ginseng, and omega-3 fatty acids, Ms. Parker-Pope noted that alternative medical treatments are rarely used individually.
Link to Ms. Parker-Pope’s article. Thanks to Joel Mittler for alerting me to the article.
Sphere: Related ContentDr. M. Romanos and colleagues examined the genetic make-up of several families and found that there are common elements that appear to be associated with ADHD. Although these findings point toward a genetic contribution to ADHD, it is important to note the caveat implied by the final sentence of the abstract: So many factors contribute to ADHD, that these results should not be construed as identifying the precise cause of the disorder. In the full article, the authors are circumspect about this: “The identification [in this study] of several novel linkage regions as well as replication of previously reported loci provides further evidence for the highly heterogeneous genetic etiology of ADHD.”
Sphere: Related ContentGenome-wide linkage analysis of ADHD using high-density SNP arrays: Novel loci at 5q13.1 and 14q12
M Romanos, C. Freitag, C. Jacob, D. W Craig, A. Dempfle, T. T. Nguyen, R. Halperin, S. Walitza, T. J Renner, C. Seitz, J. Romanos, H. Palmason, A. Reif, M. Heine, C. Windemuth-Kieselbach, C. Vogler, J. Sigmund, A. Warnke, H. Schäfer, J. Meyer, D. A. Stephan, & K. P. Lesch
Molecular Psychiatry (2008) 13, 522–530; doi:10.1038/mp.2008.12; published online 26 February 2008
Abstract
Previous genome-wide linkage studies applied the affected sib-pair design; one investigated extended pedigrees of a. genetic isolate. Here, results of a. genome-wide high-density linkage scan of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) using an array-based genotyping of approx ~50 K. single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) markers are presented. We investigated eight extended pedigrees of German origin that were non-related, not part of a. genetic isolate and ascertained on the basis of clinical referral. Two parametric analyses maximizing LOD scores (MOD) and a. non-parametric analysis for both a. broad and a. narrow phenotype approach were conducted. Novel linkage loci across all families were detected at 2q35, 5q13.1, 6q22-23 and 14q12, within individual families at 18q11.2-12.3. Further linkage regions at 7q21.11, 9q22 and 16q24.1 in all families, and at 1q25.1, 1q25.3, 9q31.1-33.1, 9q33, 12p13.33, 15q11.2-13.3 and 16p12.3-12.2 in individual families replicate previous findings. High-resolution linkage mapping points to several novel candidate genes characterized by dense expression in the brain and potential impact on disorder-relevant synaptic transmission. Our study provides further evidence for common gene effects throughout different populations despite the complex multifactorial etiology of ADHD.
NLP bunk
When confronted with Don A. Blackerby, whose Web site says he’s “recognized as the foremost Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) authority on Learning Disabilities, including Attention Deficit Disorder”; Shannon Sumrall of Advanced Behavioral Consultants who wrote “Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Education“; and Gordon Dryden and Jeannette Vos, who have a book called The Learning Revolution that incorporates NLP to fix just about anything, it is a pleasure to know that there are sensible folks like Steven Novella in the neighborhood. Dr. Novella, who’s an academic neurologist at Yale and a principal element in the New England Skeptics Society, published a sensible commentary on NLP that I strongly encourage readers to review. He goes well beyond debunking the woo (did I spell that correctly, Liz?) and discusses why NLP persists and what it will take to make the world safe from such nonsense.
This is not an April Fools’ Day post.
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