Teaching Preschoolers Executive Function Skills Can Help Reduce ADHD

A neuroscientist and Psychiatry professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver has just completed developing a new program for preschoolers that will hopefully reduce diagnosis rates of attention deficient hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and help poorer children perform as well as children from richer homes.

Dr. Adele Diamond, Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, has developed the program based off of her research on the brain's functions in the prefrontal cortex area of the brain that are executive functions (EFs). EFs include a person's ability to not become distracted while thinking, give well-thought out answers to questions instead of impulse answers, work with new information like solving problems, and to think and solve problems outside of a given parameter.

Dr. Diamond has just finished a first evaluation of a new curriculum for preschoolers called Tools of the Mind. The program focuses on developing those sorts of EFs. Tools of the Mind has been being developed for the past 12 years by two educational psychologists named Deborah Leong and Elena Bodrova. The program has been used experimentally in a few states in the U.S.

Dr. Diamond argues that teaching EFs is critical for the development of the brain and for academic success as well as for a successful life. She also argues that EFs are very seldom taught in our present education systems and that teaching them can make a significant difference in how children perform and function, particularly disadvantaged children. She states that EFs can be taught even to preschoolers.

Dr. Diamond also argues that the present ADHD epidemic may be being misdiagnosed. She believes that while some children have biological make-ups that induce hyperactivity, it may be that a lot of children being diagnosed with ADHD may actually be having problems with hyperactivity because they are not being taught to develop their skills in controlling their own attention levels, self-discipline, and self-regulation. Research has already shown that the development of EFs indicates how well a child will do academically even better than a child's IQ. Research has also shown that children from poorer families have significantly fewer EF skills than children from wealthier families. Therefore, Dr. Diamond believes that improving EF skills will help to reduce ADHD diagnoses and help poorer children perform better.

One of the advantages of the Tools of the Mind program is that it encourages children to instruct themselves out loud. It also encourages children to pretend in games through "social pretend play," which teaches them new social skills. Presently, preschool teachers are being encouraged to have the children spend less time playing and more time learning under traditional instructional settings. However, Dr. Diamond argues that playing is more critical to brain development and academic success than previously believed.

Colleagues from the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, New Jersey also worked to evaluate the Tools of the Mind program. The researchers assessed 14 five-year old children from a low-income school district in urban USA. The researchers divided up the children and assigned to them either the Tools of the Mind curriculum or another new balanced literacy curriculum called dBL. The dBL program covered the same academic areas the Tools of the Mind program covered. Both of the programs also used the exact same resources.

The researchers randomly assigned teachers and children to either program. All of the teachers assigned had the same level of education and experience in teaching. The children in both programs all lived in the same neighborhood, had the same ethnic identity, and their families had similar income and education levels. All of the children went through either the Tools of the Mind program or the dBL program for either one or two years.

The researchers than evaluated the EF skills of both groups of children. They gave the children two tests that were evaluated by computer. The tests consisted of asking the children to complete projects they had never completed before. The test results showed very clearly that the children who had been given the Tools of the Mind program were more capable of using their EF skills with regards to new problems and solve the problem faster.

Hilary Thomson, "Pre-school Program Shown to Improve Key Cognitive Functions, Self-control," University of British Columbia.