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ADHD Can Make It Difficult to Show What You Know - Psychology Today

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When my son was in elementary school, I suggested to his teachers he would be successful in the advanced classes offered in math and science. However, their view was not the same as mine. His teachers were concerned about him falling behind because he had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Despite their concern, in 4th and 5th grade, my son was one of the top-performing students in math and science in the entire grade, and he even won a national award for excellence in math.

Then, in middle school, my son was evaluated for the county’s gifted and talented (GT) program. Despite my son scoring within the range for the GT program in math, his teachers did not recommend him for the program because he had ADHD and was struggling to turn in school assignments; they did not fully understand that the challenge of the GT curriculum would help my son to succeed academically. It was around this same time that my son became a national finalist in a contest sponsored by NASA to design a spacecraft to land on Mars.

Too often, kids with ADHD are expected to act and perform in school like their neurotypical peers. Unfortunately, due to the stigma associated with being labeled as having ADHD, your child may be thought of as having a lower intelligence and denied certain opportunities where he/she might excel.

 Olia Danilevich/Pexels
Source: Olia Danilevich/Pexels

Inattention and Intelligence Unrelated

My son’s least-favorite subject in school is English. It is the class in which he struggles the most to stay focused and complete his work. We can all relate to being less motivated to do something mundane or unenjoyable, like laundry or paying bills, but we are mindful of the consequences: no clean clothes to wear or the electricity being turned off. However, children with ADHD can struggle to overcome their dislike for something, like homework or a certain subject in school, and may not be motivated by the potential consequences, like a failing grade.

Children with ADHD become understimulated more easily than their non-ADHD counterparts, especially with easy, rote, or long assignments at school, which can affect assignment correctness and completion. In addition, children with ADHD struggle with the demanding verbal skills in school but excel in the less emphasized spatial and artistic skills.

It is important to point out that children with ADHD often understand the subject material required to complete an undesirable assignment and can get A’s and B’s when the work is completed. In fact, research on ADHD symptoms and academic performance suggests that inattention and intelligence are unrelated. For example, reading difficulties in ADHD children are not associated with intelligence, but, rather, the inattention symptoms of ADHD likely interfere with reading ability. In fact, some children with ADHD are considered twice exceptional due to their intellectual giftedness combined with a diagnosis of ADHD. Some adults with ADHD have been reported to have intelligence quotients (IQs) of 120 or above, placing them into the top 9 percent of the population.

Executive Functioning, Working Memory, and Academic Performance

So, if our kids with ADHD are intelligent, why is it so difficult for them to pay attention, complete assignments for school, or follow a set of instructions? It has to do with executive functioning and working memory. Executive functioning is a neurological process that enables us to pay attention to what is most important at the time so we can perform the appropriate behaviors.

See if this scenario sounds familiar: Your child with ADHD is engrossed in some activity of his/her choosing, like a video game or building with LEGOs; you give him/her a 15-minute warning to get ready for soccer practice. When you check on your child 15 minutes later, you find he/she has not moved, and you are now going to be late to practice. Kids with ADHD have trouble stopping inappropriate behaviors (playing a computer game, building LEGOs) to focus on appropriate behaviors (getting ready for soccer practice) due to their deficits in executive functioning.

THE BASICS

In addition, executive functioning is important for planning and initiating tasks, time management, organization, and emotional control. As kids with ADHD are paying attention to everything all the time, they have difficulty paying attention to and completing one specific task, like a classroom assignment, which requires the executive functioning skills they lack. However, diffuse attention can make a child with ADHD an expert at something. For my son, it’s his relentless learning about anything related to outer space, rocket ships, and space travel. All his knowledge about outer space is self-taught from reading books and visiting various educational Web sites on the computer. My son’s interest and intense focus was the reason he was a national finalist in the NASA-sponsored contest.

Another key component to why your child with ADHD may seem distracted and forgetful is working memory, our most immediate form of memory. Working memory allows us to store information in our brains to be used later. Let’s say you are solving a multistep math problem—for example, 10+15-2=? You calculate 10+15=25; you can hold the number 25 in your memory stores due to working memory, so you can go on to complete the rest of the problem: 25-2=23. Another example is when you are following a recipe: Your working memory enables you to remember which ingredients you already added. Children with ADHD can forget what they were supposed to be paying attention to because the important information held in their working memory can easily be replaced by other stimuli like video games or building LEGOs.

ADHD Essential Reads

Children with ADHD are often forgetful and may focus on something else when they are bored because of deficits in executive functions and working memory, which leads to school assignments not being turned in and failing grades. However, their inattention has nothing to do with their intelligence, and they may even be an expert on something they are passionate about. But sometimes their ADHD brains get in the way, making it difficult to “show what you know,” affecting how ADHD kids are viewed in terms of their academic ability. My son’s response when I asked him about a class he was failing as a high-school freshman: “Mom, the class was boring, and I didn’t want to do it.”

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