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ADHD and Learning
The term, attention deficit is a misnomer of sorts. Students do not have deficits of attention or lack attention. They do, however, have an inability to pay attention to low-level, ordinary stimuli like a classroom lesson or homework. Their attention is diffused – spread over a wide area. Should you ask an ADHD student what’s going on in the classroom, you would likely receive an answer containing information about the cobweb in the corner, the bird outside the window on a tree branch, a little about the teacher’s lesson, and a little about the person who just walked by the doorway.
Conversely, when stimuli are interesting, an ADHD person can hyperfocus (selective attention) – focus to the exclusion of all extraneous stimuli. It often confuses parents when a child can hyperfocus on a commercial video game for hours but cannot finish homework. Some children bury themselves in a book excluding everything else around them.
Inattention and inattention coupled with hyperactivity negatively affect the learning process. To understand how distractibility and impulsivity affect the learning process, it is important understand how we learn. The following diagram illustrates how we learn and how inattention affects the learning process.
Learning Process Flow Diagram
The teaching method is the series of actions that includes content and organization of teaching materials. It encompasses both how and what is learned, the teacher's and learner's attributes, and the learning environment. Examples may include use of preparatory sets, computerized instruction, repeating instructions, or providing an example, etc.
The learner's attributes include the learner's entire schema: all existing knowledge, metacognitive skills, disabilities, and memory capabilities. This is everything the student brings to the classroom physically and mentally.
The learning process demands that the student pay as much attention to the teaching method as possible in order to assimilate the data provided. If this occurs, then cognitive processing of the data can occur which leads to integration and organization with prior information in the learner's schema (learning). An ADHD student frequently cannot pay enough attention to the classroom lesson and therefore does not absorb the material, i.e., the student does not learn as much or as well as his peers.
Conclusion
Research has demonstrated that certain strategies to improve academic performance can be employed with limited success. See Classroom Strategies for ADHD.