Writing Characteristics of Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder: A Meta‐Analysis

Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) frequently experience significant difficulty mastering basic academic skills. This meta‐analysis focuses on one specific potential area of learning difficulties for these students: namely, writing. To identify the extent and depth of the potential writing challenges faced by students with ADHD, we conducted a meta‐analysis comparing the writing performance of grade 1 to 12 students with ADHD to their normally achieving peers. We located 44 papers, yielding 45 studies with 87 effect sizes. The average weighted effect sizes showed that students with ADHD obtained lower scores than their normally achieving peers for writing quality (–0.78), output (–0.64), number of genre elements (–0.69), vocabulary (–0.76), spelling (–0.80), and handwriting (–0.62). Contrary to expectations, moderator analyses found that neither study quality nor the source from which ADHD students were drawn (i.e., school/community vs. clinic/hospital) accounted for variability above sampling error alone.     

DIRECT NON‐VIOLENT ACTION AND THE LAW

This article was delivered as the plenary address at the Massachusetts Association for Bilingual Education Annual Conference, November, 1986. The style of the speech has been preserved.     

Interaction effects of teacher enthusiasm and student notetaking on recall and recognition of lecture content

The purpose of this study was to determine whether teacher enthusiasm and student notetaking activity would interact to produce significant differences in students’ learning from lecture. Three modes of student learning activity (listen only, notes, notes plus review) were crossed with two levels of lecturer enthusiasm (less enthusiastic, more enthusiastic) in a 3X2 MANOVA design. Dependent variables were simple recall, complex recall, and recognition of lecture content. Results showed a significant interaction for simple recall. Also, a significant main effect was obtained for learning activity. Findings are discussed with respect to how learning activity and teacher behavior can function jointly in student processing of information. Suggestions for future research are given in light of limitations to the present study.