Anna Maria Re

Expressive Writing Difficulties in Children Described as Exhibiting ADHD Symptoms

Three groups of children of different ages who were considered by their teachers as showing symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and matched controls were tested in a series of expressive writing tasks, derived from a standardized writing test. In the first study, 24 sixth- and seventh-grade children with ADHD symptoms wrote a description of an image. The ADHD groups expressive writing was worse than that of the control group and associated with a higher number of errors, mainly concerning accents and geminates. The second study showed the generality of the effect by testing younger groups of children with ADHD symptoms and controls with another description task where a verbal description was substituted for the picture stimulus. The third study extended the previous observations with another type of writing task, the request of writing a narrative text. In all the three studies, children with ADHD symptoms scored lower than controls on four qualitative parameters (adequacy, structure, grammar, and lexicon), produced shorter texts, and made more errors. These studies show that children with ADHD symptoms have school difficulties also in writing—both in spelling and expression—and that these difficulties are extended to different tasks and ages.

Improving Expressive Writing Skills of Children Rated for ADHD Symptoms

The present study examines the expressive writing abilities of children described by their teachers as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptoms and of matched controls and the effects of two types of facilitation. A group of 35 ADHD children and matched controls are given the task of composing a letter either under standard instructions or with facilitation (a guide scheme), preceded by a brief training on how to use the facilitation. Results show that both groups drew benefit from the guide scheme. Despite the fact that differences between groups were maintained after the training for the case of spelling errors, the poorer performance of ADHD children vanished. It is concluded that ADHD children have poor expressive writing skills, but this can be improved through the help of a guide scheme preceded by brief training.

Which Tasks Best Discriminate between Dyslexic University Students and Controls in a Transparent Language

The need for a battery for testing adult dyslexia, and especially university students, is being increasingly recognized in view of the increased number of adult requests for a dyslexia examination in relation to both assistance and protection from discrimination. The present study examines the discriminative validity of a battery we have developed-the Battery for the Assessment of Reading and Writing in Adulthood-through comparison of the performance of 24 university students with a history of severe developmental dyslexia and 99 controls. All the reading, writing, lexical decision and spelling tasks of the battery, except omissions in a lexical decision task and reading comprehension, showed a good discriminatory power. In addition, use of just two of these tasks (fluency in reading a text and spelling under articulatory suppression) gave 87% sensitivity and 97% specificity. Our results confirm that in transparent languages, measures of phonological automaticity are the best indexes of reading decoding competence, particularly in adults.

Increased intraindividual variability is a marker of ADHD but also of dyslexia: A study on handwriting

It has been suggested that intraindividual variability (IIV) in neuropsychological tasks may be a specific characteristic of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), but previous research has not thoroughly examined whether IIV also concerns academic performance or other types of developmental disabilities. The present study investigates the role of IIV in 15 children with ADHD without reading difficulties, 15 children with dyslexia without associated symptoms of ADHD, and 15 typically developing children (TDC) in a simple response time (SRT) task and in a skill more directly related with school learning-handwriting. Results show that children with ADHD and those with dyslexia have a greater IIV than the TDC in both tasks. However, the pattern of the relationship between IIV in SRT and handwriting was different in children with ADHD and dyslexia: the IIV in the handwriting task was found to depend on IIV in the SRT task only in children with dyslexia. These findings support the crucial role of IIV not only in ADHD but also in other developmental disabilities, but suggest that in children with ADHD it may present specific aspects related with motor control.

Working Memory Control Deficit in Kindergarten ADHD Children

The present study tests the hypothesis that a working memory deficit is also found in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms as young as 5 and is related to the control of interfering information. One group of 23 kindergarten children identified by the presence of ADHD symptoms and one group of 23 children matched for gender, age, and socioeconomic status were administered a visuospatial working memory task that required the selective recall of information. Children with ADHD symptoms performed more poorly than controls and were affected to a particularly high extent by intrusion errors (i.e., recalling of information initially encoded but that needed to be consequently suppressed during the task).

Two New Rating Scales for Assessment of ADHD Symptoms in Italian Preschool Children A Comparison Between Parent and Teacher Ratings

Objective: Two new rating scales are presented for the assessment of ADHD symptoms in Italian preschool children, and the agreement between parents and teachers on the presence of an ADHD profile is examined. Method: The scales were administered to parents and teachers of 180 children with a mean age of 5 years and 9 months, attending final year of the Italian preschool system (kindergarten). Results: Despite the good psychometric properties of the scales, parent and teacher agreement was poor and parents endorsed more symptomatic behaviors in their children than the teachers, especially for the hyperactive dimension, although they did not necessarily associate these with the presence of a potential problem. Conclusions: The low correspondence between teachers and parents shows that ADHD rating scales, although useful screening instruments, are not sufficient for diagnosis and must be combined with other tools. ( J. of Att. Dis. 2009; 12(6) 532-539)

Memory for an imagined pathway and strategy effects in sighted and in totally congenitally blind individuals

The literature reports mixed results on the imagery abilities of the blind, at times showing a difference between sighted and blind individuals and at other times similarities. However, the possibility that the results are due to different strategies spontaneously used in performing the imagery tasks has never been systematically studied. A large group of 30 totally congenitally blind (TCB) individuals and a group of 30 sighted individuals matched for gender age and schooling were presented with a mental pathway task on a complex two-dimensional (5 x 5) matrix. After administering the task, participants were interviewed in order to establish the strategy they used. Results showed that both sighted and TCB may use a spatial mental imagery, a verbal or a mixed strategy in carrying out the task. Differences between the groups emerged only when last location and then entire pathway had to be remembered rather than just the last position, and were clearly affected by the type of strategy. Specifically, TCB performed more poorly than the sighted individuals when they used a spatial mental imagery strategy, whereas the two groups had a similar performance with a verbal strategy.

Spelling Errors in Text Copying by Children With Dyslexia and ADHD Symptoms

Spelling errors are usually studied in dictations, but teachers report that children with school difficulties often make spelling mistakes when they copy a text too. The present study examines the performance on a text copying task and a text dictation task of two groups of children known for their difficulties in spelling, that is, 22 with symptoms of ADHD and 13 with dyslexia, comparing them with matched controls to see whether children with spelling difficulties make more copying task errors than do controls, whether they make fewer mistakes when copying than when writing under dictation, and whether the pattern of errors remains the same or differs in copy and dictation tasks. Our results show that although children with spelling difficulties made fewer errors in the copying task than under dictation, they still made phonological errors and mistakes relating to accents and duplicates. The pattern of errors differed slightly between the children with dyslexia and those with ADHD, presumably as a consequence of their different underlying weaknesses—related mainly to phonology and orthographic representation in the case of dyslexia and to attentional control in the case of ADHD.

Reading Comprehension and Expressive Writing: A Comparison Between Good and Poor Comprehenders

This study investigated expressive writing in 8- to 10-year-old children with different levels of reading comprehension. Poor and good comprehenders were presented with three expressive writing tasks where the modality (pictorial vs. verbal) and the text genre (narrative vs. descriptive) varied. Results showed that poor comprehenders’ performance was minimally influenced by the modality of the prompt. In fact, their performance was generally worse than that of good comprehenders and affected by the text genre, as the quality of their narratives was generally lower than that of good comprehenders. However, in the descriptive text condition, their performance was comparable to that of good comprehenders. One can conclude that their problems depend on the characteristics of the narrative text where coherence and causality are important elements.

Response to Specific Training for Students With Different Levels of Mathematical Difficulties

The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of specific, individualized training for students with different levels of mathematical difficulties. Fifty-four students, with either severe or mild math difficulties, were assigned to individualized training or to a control condition. Ten students with severe math difficulties (“dyscalculia”) and 17 with mild math difficulties in the individualized training conditions were trained to improve their accuracy and fluency in math, compared to 9 students with severe math difficulties and 18 with mild math difficulties that were in the general training group (control condition). Students in the individualized training condition (both with dyscalculia and with mild math difficulties) outperformed the control groups after the training and at a later follow-up in almost all math components. Overall, this study supports the feasibility of treating both severe and mild mathematical accuracy and fluency difficulties with specific, customized training.