Educational Skills With ADHD

In which ways would someone with ADHD struggle with their ability to gain educational skill compared to someone without ADHD?

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, which means that there are deficiencies in the brain with ADHD that affect the development of a child. ADHD does not influence the intelligence of a child, but is commonly thought to. However, having ADHD does affect a person’s ability to regulate attention and emotions, and produces hyperactivity, impulsivity, and organizational problems. Someone with ADHD would struggle to gain educational skill by having a lack of cautiousness in school work, overlooking small details in schoolwork, and make careless mistakes in larger assignments and projects.

These inattentive mistakes can also apply to many other day to day activities such as emotional state of a person with ADHD, which tends to be more prominent in kids rather than adults.Since the tendency to have inaccurate emotions is so prominent, it can be sometimes difficult to deal with a student or classmate who has ADHD, because ADHD can trigger intense emotions as well as mood swings that are negative and are usually visible in anger, hurt, or frustration. Someone with ADHD would also struggle with paying attention in school during lectures, and conversations.Having this disorder in an educational environment will cause someone with ADHD to be more likely not to listen when being directly spoken to. When being directly spoken to, someone with ADHD will struggle with being able to recognize emotions in others, and sometimes do not even process the emotions of others at all, portraying them as insensitive. As well as struggling to comprehend conversations, people with ADHD are easily sidetracked, and do not follow through with schoolwork, taks, duties, and chores.

How could someone with ADHD improve their learning abilities in education? When someone with ADHD is studying for a test, rereading is ineffective way for them to learn or become successful on a test. This may be because reading is quite challenging, and comes across to the reader as passive, as well as not enjoyable for the brain of someone with ADHD to learn information.

Reading with ADHD may take several minutes longer than someone without ADHD because reading words, sounds, and phrases quickly because reading is too complex for the ADHD brain, so when reading those phrases and sentences, the brain must stop and sound out letters and words. Research shows that the best way for someone with ADHD to study is by making a practice test before an exam. Someone with ADHD who is successful in studying would look over important parts of notes, study guides, puzzles, and asking their peers what they think is important, then create a study guide based off this information. When using this study guide, research shows that studying in multiple settings will help this studying process.

If someone with ADHD were to study in their own room, they may get caught up in other things such as a phone, laptop, or music instead of focusing on schoolwork. To add on to not being focused, by staying at home, someone with ADHD may not have consistent attentiveness throughout the entire studying session. In multiple settings someone with ADHD will not feel as cramped and pressured to study. Also someone with ADHD should. avoid cramming when studying. Spacing out the studying over the course of a few days will help them review the material, get familiar with the material, and lets them “sleep on it”. Sleeping helps people learn, as your brain becomes more active during the night than it is day. When sleeping, the brain replays events in your head that happened over the course of the day, therefore you relay this information.If someone were to cram all of your studying into a single two or three hour studying session, they would find themselves reviewing critical material a minimum number of times, and this information is less likely to be remembered compared to studying for shorter amounts of time over the course of 3-4 days.

How would someone with ADHD learn differently than with dyslexia?

About 50%-60% of people with ADHD have some sort of learning disability which is most commonly dyslexia.Both ADHD and Dyslexia are complex neurobehavioral disorders. Many people think that dyslexia (along with ADHD) is a reflection of intelligence however, most people with dyslexia have average, or above average intelligence. Dyslexia isn’t just the mixing up of words, or having trouble sounding them out. Dyslexia makes it difficult for someone to read, write, and spell as well as people without dyslexia. People with dyslexia have trouble with recognizing, and breaking down the sounds of letters.

A way to identify these disorders is by knowing that dyslexia problems occur mostly during reading and writing activities, where ADHD occurs in many settings and are more behavioral in nature. Writing is also difficult for someone with ADHD because they have a hard time proofreading/rereading/organization in what they write and someone with dyslexia will struggle with grammar,spelling,organizing ideas, proofreading, and handwriting. Kids with both ADHD and dyslexia will be easily distracted, but the reasons are different.

ADHD will make it difficult to pay attention and dyslexia requires great amount of effort to read and their energy has been drained. A child with ADHD might not read very well and may not be able to comprehend the text very well because they often lose their place and skip endings. Someone with dyslexia might not comprehend text very well because it takes them a long time to sound words out. Regardless of whatever the cause is, both disorders affect the reader’s ability to understand what they read. This also means reading is not an enjoyable activity for them.

How does the behavior of someone with ADHD compared to the behavior of someone without ADHD?

After the course of many years, researchers have found that there are clear structural differences in the ADHD compared to someone without the disorder. It has been reported from Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre that people with ADHD have smaller brain volume in sub areas of the brain, and in total the brain was smaller in size too. These differences were greater in children less than adults.

Along with this, researchers have also found that the ADHD will mature at a slower pace (about 1-3 years slower) and that this brain will never reach the maturity of someone without the disorder. The brain of someone with ADHD will have alterations in blood flow, and decreased blood flow means decreased brain activity to several different areas of the brain.This includes decreases in blood flow to certain prefrontal areas. The prefrontal area of the brain in which it affects houses the executive functions that are responsible for tasks including planning, organizing, paying attention, remembering, and emotional reactions. A study found that children who have ADHD will not have the same connections in the brain between the frontal cortex and the brain’s visual processing area. This means that the two brains of a child with, and without ADHD will be processing information differently.

Decreased blood flow may be the cause of this. In the brain is a busy communication network where messages are relayed from one neuron to neuron (or brain cell to brain cell). In the brain of a child with ADHD, there is a gap between neurons, which is referred to as a synapse. For the message to be passed through the brain, the synapse must be filled with a neurotransmitter. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers, and each one is responsible for different functions. An essential neurotransmitter for ADHD is dopamine. However, in the ADHD brain, there is an inequality of the dopamine system. Because of this, there is either too little, or not enough receptors for the dopamine, or the dopamine is not being used efficiently. Medications help ADHD because they produce more dopamine to keep this system level,and keep dopamine in the synapses longer.

What are the symptoms of ADHD, and when do they become noticable? Can they be treated?

A child can only be diagnosed with ADHD if the child has shown at least six of the nine symptoms AND if these symptoms have been noticeable for six months in two or more settings. (home,school, etc.)These symptoms will interfere with the child’s learning and/or mental development which makes them easier to identify. A child with ADHD may find it difficult or impossible to participate in a task that requires continuous mental exertion, this also applies to schoolwork and homework that require focused effort. Many symptoms become noticeable before the age of twelve (at least some must be noticeable before this age).

Someone older who is being diagnosed will need to frequently exhibit 5 symptoms, in multiple settings (work, home, etc.). Most symptoms of ADHD will look different in children than in adults, for example, an adult symptoms of ADHD may be low-tolerance for frustration, as that symptom is less likely to appear in a younger child. However there are a few symptoms that are similar in both adults and in children, such as the inability to complete/follow through in school work, or work assignments. While there is no known cure for ADHD, there are several treatment plans and medications that someone with ADHD could take to maintain as much stability as possible.

There is no straight medication someone with ADHD could start taking right away, the medical plan should be discussed with a doctor who can help the patient find an appropriate prescription suited to the patient’s needs. Someone who has ADHD and would like to start taking medication, and could choose between stimulant medication, and non-stimulant medication. Stimulant medication is more common, and is known to increase the amount of dopamine in a person’s body, while non-stimulant medication increases amount of norepinephrine in someones body that helps with attention and memory.