... how can the ADHD research be so inane?
I am reacting to this piece from the NY Times Sunday Magazine. At first, I thought it an interesting read but as I got further into it I became increasingly frustrated with the maintained assumptions. Let me explain my concerns.
Here is the setup in many of the experiments described in the essay. Students known to have ADHD are divided into two groups. Both are tasked with doing something cognitively challenging. The first group gets some treatment (Ritalin, Adderall, or something else in that family of drugs) while the second group gets the placebo. Then they are scored on engagement in the doing the task and in the success on working out the problem. On the engagement front, the first group well outperforms the second. In identifying a solution, however, both groups are equally bad. Though engaged, the first group doesn't come up with a good strategy for addressing the problem posed.
Now, let's take a step back from ADHD and instead focus on learning. Then we'll return to ADHD and its consequences for non-learning. It seems appropriate to posit that learning is cumulative. That goes for reasoning skills, background knowledge needed to make sense of the current situation, and a sense of confidence that when working a problem one can get to a reasonable solution. For those students who don't have learning disabilities, whether ADHD or something else, we'd fully expect the junior high school student to be more proficient than the first grader in these dimensions and we'd expect the high school student to be even further along. But for a student with ADHD or some other learning disorder, is that true? If the lack of prior growth inhibits the learner at a later stage, why should we think that engagement will address the issue, unless engagement goes back to square one and allows the growth to occur so as to catch up, albeit at a later time in life than is usual? But that's not what the experiments reported about in the essay did. Apparently they assumed the students had age-appropriate reasoning skills, only to find that their experiments revealed otherwise.
Now I'm aware that students are scored on their reading by grade level. I wish students were likewise-wise scored on their reasoning by grade level, but to my knowledge they are not. What, however, would happen if reading grade level were taken as a proxy for reasoning grade level? Could the experimenters have obtained the students' reading grade level before administering their treatment? If they had done that, would the experimental results have been so surprising?
Later in the piece there is a discussion about stimulants and their impact on engagement of the people who are taking the stimulants. After reading a bit in this part, I did a Google search to ask, is coffee a stimulant? Indeed it is. If the author of the piece acknowledged that up front, and also acknowledged that most readers of the piece were doing so while drinking coffee, then the idea of stimulant or not seems unrealistic. The vast majority of us are on stimulants. Comparing Adderall to coffee might then be useful to establish level of intensity as an important matter. But stimulants or not as an issue should never have been brought to our attention.
Finally, I believe that engagement itself is not a sufficient test, though it is evidently necessary. The issue is engagement in something that promotes personal growth versus engagement that is mainly dissipative. And on this matter, one needs to ask whether others can task the student and merely by doing so assert that is important. Were the student to task himself or herself and do so in a responsible way, would he or she concur or do otherwise? We can only speculate about our historical giants. Were Einstein and Freud, for example, hampered by learning disabilities, ADHD or otherwise? We can all agree that Vincent van Gogh was so hampered. But he clearly was engaged. Is that the answer then?
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