ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity

ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a disorder in behavior in which a child demonstrates excessive level of activeness, inability to sustain his attention to a particular subject, and impulsivity. Within school situations, it was found that children with ADHD are oftentimes distracted easily by different things around him. They find it hard to sustain their attention to what is being taught. As a consequence, children with ADHD have poor academic status in their class.

There are some research and studies that were conducted on the effects of ADHD on the learning process of students who have it. One study, conducted by DuPaul and Henningson, indicated the following findings of Pfiffner and Barkley on the effect of high-rate of hyperactivity to children's participation in class.

As a result, they have fewer opportunities to respond during academic instruction and complete less independent work than their normal counterparts.

This poor learning capacity of children with ADHD is particularly exhibited in mathematics skills. Aro and his colleagues (1999), in their study Contribution of ADHD Characteristics to the Academic Treatment Outcome of Children with Learning Difficulties, and from an educational battery test they conducted on children with ADHD, they found that 39% of the participants show difficulties in mathematics.

Having an ADHD causes a child to have poor learning skills especially in subjects that require sustained attention. Mathematics, one of the learning skills where intelligence is usually measured, is found to be among those where ADHD children exhibit poor skills and knowledge. An ADHD child who works on a mathematics problem can easily divert his attention to other things once he is distracted. As a result, he also easily looses the previous concentration or thinking that he has on the mathematics problem.

Effective/Ineffective Ways of Teaching Children with ADHD

DuPaul and Henningson (1993) focused on Peer Tutoring as one way to improve the learning abilities of children with ADHD. Peer tutoring is a process of providing ADHD students with learning instructions that match their pace of learning, and an immediate feedback to their learning responses (example: immediate acknowledgement of correct answer such as by giving points). DuPaul and Henningson indicated the following properties of peer tutoring, as well as the reason why this process of learning is effective.

Tasks that require active responses to academic material help to channel potentially disruptive behaviors into constructive responses.

Children with ADHD exhibit higher rates of appropriate responding when performance feedback is immediate and administered individually rather than delayed and delivered in a group setting.

Students with attention problems are more likely to succeed on academic tasks that are well-matched to their abilities and when instructed at their pace of learning.

To gather data on how effective peer tutoting is, DuPaul and Henningson implemented their case study on an ADHD child, Don, by observing his behavior when given with the traditional teacher lecturing and when provided with peer tutoring method. The case study's result shows that Don exhibited a higher rate of fidgety and out of task behavior in the classwide learning process. On the other hand, during peer tutoring, Don showed a significant improvement both in his academic performance and stability of focus to his tasks.

In another study conducted by Aro and his colleagues, where they implemented their analysis by providing more teaching guidance and supervision on non-ADHD and ADHD children, they found that provision of more attention to ADHD students during their process of learning helps them improve their focus on what they are doing. After the treatment, the results show that those children with a high hyperactivity level somehow learned to control their impulsivity in a situation such as solving mathematical problems, which requires effortful processing..."