What is reading comprehension like with ADHD? It is hard, but you can help!

Image from Impact Parents

It is your first day of kindergarten. You are excited to start school and to make new friends. School seems great at first, but you start to notice that you talk too much and fidget more than others. You are scolded constantly for losing your things. It seems so unfair. Adults in your life dismiss these behaviours and tell you that you will grow out of them.

But by grade 3, things do not change. You still forget where you left your lunch and even your favourite teddy bear! You still talk too much, but strangely enough, you find it hard to make friends and often feel left out. School seems to be more challenging than before. Reading is hard, math is hard, sitting still is hard. Finally, your teachers become worried and suggest that you see a psychologist.

It turns out that you have attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder (ADHD).

In addition to the experiences above, as many as 40 – 60% of kids with ADHD struggle with language and reading skills. Since literacy is one of the main building blocks for learning, people with ADHD can have a hard time at school. Addressing this challenge is the main motivation for Ph.D. candidate Kaitlyn Parks and her colleagues at Western University.

In a recent paper, Parks and colleagues reviewed all the available research studying the link between ADHD and reading comprehension. They identified several tasks that measure reading comprehension in both research and education and compared how people with and without ADHD performed on these tasks. This knowledge can give researchers, teachers, and caregivers a better sense of what people with ADHD struggle with and how to help advocate for their needs.

WHAT IS READING COMPREHENSION LIKE IN ADHD?

There are many tasks for measuring reading comprehension in research and education. To unpack the results of Parks and colleagues’ study, we can focus on the two most common reading comprehension tasks: cloze procedure and passage comprehension. The authors discussed these tasks and showed how well they measure reading comprehension in people with ADHD.

In the cloze procedure task, participants receive a story that is missing words. Participants must fill in the spaces with the correct words from the story. Usually, kids with ADHD perform worse on this task than their peers. However, when this task is changed slightly to finding incorrect words, kids with ADHD can do just as well. This is because people with ADHD can have difficulty working with and maintaining information in their memories – also known as working memory. For example, we use our working memory to follow multistep instructions or when we perform mental math. Working memory deficits make it especially hard for people with ADHD to recall information that they need to successfully complete the cloze procedure task. Instead, it is less demanding on their working memory to recognize wrong information in the midst of correct information. These results show that small changes to tasks can allow kids with ADHD to display their comprehension skills without overloading their working memory.

Adapted from Classroom

Another way to measure reading comprehension is through a passage comprehension task in which participants read a story and then respond to open-ended short answer and multiple-choice questions. You may have seen questions like these on school tests. For the task, participants need to recall ideas and make conclusions based on evidence from the story. People with ADHD often have a hard time responding to open-ended questions. Some researchers believe that this is caused by a difficulty in planning and working memory, making it hard for them to pick out relevant ideas. Interestingly, when people with ADHD can listen to calm background music, have extra time to answer questions, and have their stories printed out rather than on the computer, they can do this task better than without these supports. Printed out stories give people with ADHD more control over their flow of reading, making it easier for them to go back and forth. Background music seems to be grounding for people with ADHD, by helping them block out distractions. These findings show, yet again, that small changes can help kids with ADHD succeed.

Overall, Parks and colleagues found that people with ADHD struggle with reading comprehension and do worse than their peers on tasks that measure these abilities. This is in part because people with ADHD struggle with open-ended and unstructured tasks. When these tasks are changed to support people with ADHD, they can do just as well as their peers. These findings highlight the importance of making modifications at school and home so that people with ADHD can have an equal shot at showing their knowledge.

SO HOW CAN WE HELP?

Researchers, teachers, and caregivers play a vital role in supporting kids with ADHD. Aside from providing them with equal opportunities at school to show all their knowledge, we can also advocate for them to help them succeed. To *cloze* off, let’s look at some of the modifications and supports that Parks and colleagues found in the research. Children with ADHD do better on reading comprehension tasks when their working memory load is reduced. This can look like asking structured questions and providing organizational tools to map their answers. Children with ADHD also do better when they can navigate what they read at their own pace, so having printed out stories and flexible time is helpful for them. Finally, providing calm background music can help them block out distractions.

With about 5% of children in Canada affected by ADHD, chances are, you know someone who lives with this condition whether they are your family, friend, or student. We can use the knowledge above to provide the right learning environment to help people with ADHD share all they know!