Children with ADD/ADHD and executive functioning problems can have difficulty learning and often benefit from an education plan that addresses two specific needs: structuring and flexibility.
According to the team at the ADHD Cognition Centre in Toronto, children with ADHD often struggle with very specific areas of language and learning:
- Pragmatic (Social) Language
- Higher-Order Language (cause/effect, compare/contrast, and inference)
- Math Procedures and Problem Solving
- Reading Fluency
- Reading Comprehension
- Organization of Written Narratives
The Brain and Behaviour Centre’s research is considered the “gold-standard” and is the basis for our recommendations that children with ADD/ADHD and executive functioning problems can benefit from an education plan that addresses two specific needs:
(1) Structuring aimed at helping her build her own internal structured approach to problem solving for spoken language, reading fluency, reading comprehension, written expression, math procedures, math problem solving, and student success skills.
(2) Flexibility of classroom accommodations for the specific weaknesses associated with the individual child’s executive skill difficulties. As the child with executive function difficulties is developing her own internal structure for completing multifaceted tasks, she will benefit from accommodations to support her weak executive skills.
Parents and Educators are encouraged to collaborate to meet the child’s needs through synergistic educational planning. Parents of children who attend public school are urged to formalize services through either section 504 or special education.
(c) 2009-2010, flexiture, monte w. davenport, ph.d.
