Hyperactive children need a favourable learning environment

Sophie's teachers are worried. The eight-year-old is dreamy and forgetful. She also finds it difficult to sit still and wait her turn. Her inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity are symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD for short. This medical diagnosis is given to children with severe manifestations of these difficulties.

However, children without this diagnosis can also be affected to a lesser extent. Without support, Sophie's learning success and academic performance may be jeopardised. Sophie's teachers are now faced with the question of how they can best support her development, learning and academic performance.

Sophie's concentration and behavioural difficulties at school may also be due to the classroom and learning environment not meeting her needs. In line with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, her teachers should therefore make efforts to make her learning environment more suitable.

By making the forms of teaching more flexible, all pupils can demonstrate their knowledge in the way that suits them best.

For example, guidelines for dealing with ADHD symptoms inside and outside the classroom can provide assistance. They can be implemented with the support of experts, such as school psychologists. And although there are big differences in children with an ADHD diagnosis, teachers can take some measures to help pupils like Sophie.

Enabling individualised learning

For example, they can implement the guidelines of the so-called «Universal Design for Learning». These aim to ensure that all pupils have comparable opportunities to succeed. In practice, this means, for example, that they can decide for themselves how they access the learning material, how they engage with it and how they demonstrate what they know.

Teachers can provide both digital and audio information, allow the use of noise-cancelling headphones during silent work or use role-play and discussions to engage students emotionally. By making lessons more flexible, all pupils - regardless of whether they have concentration and behavioural difficulties or not - are given a variety of opportunities to learn and demonstrate their knowledge in the way that suits them best.

Another way to improve equal opportunities is to change teaching methods while keeping the performance requirements the same. However, the extent to which such changes are actually effective has hardly been investigated to date.

For example, although students diagnosed with ADHD claim to benefit from longer exam completion times, there is little evidence to date that this measure actually leads to better results. Another common recommendation is to have students with ADHD sit close to their teachers. Although this has a positive effect on learning, it generally applies to all pupils.

Strengthening the relationship between teacher and pupil

The specific measures that are useful for individual pupils also depend on the individual characteristics of the children, such as their age, their strengths and their respective needs. Adaptations should always be tailored to the individual and the learning environment. At the same time, teachers should ideally closely monitor the effectiveness of the established measures to determine whether they are achieving the desired result.

By providing various types of support, teachers can help to avoid or minimise a mismatch between the individual's abilities and the classroom environment. The interaction between the teacher and the pupil can help to prevent inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity from increasing.

Teachers can offer emotional support, for example by communicating sensitively with the children and taking their perspectives into account. In this way, they create a safe and secure environment in which children can try out and improve their social interactions and better regulate their emotions. Emotionally supportive interactions are particularly important for children with behavioural and concentration difficulties.

Organisational support is also helpful for inattentive, hyperactive and impulsive children. Through good classroom management, teachers can manage the behaviour of their pupils in an unobtrusive and proactive way so that attention and behaviour conducive to learning are supported. By clearly formulating expectations and acting as role models, they make it clear to their pupils how they should behave and how they can improve their own learning.

Clear guidelines promote the willingness to learn

Through supportive measures in the classroom, such as suitable learning opportunities with an appropriate level of difficulty, teachers can ultimately also promote their pupils' cognitive skills and willingness to learn and improve learning outcomes. Carefully designed learning activities give children enough time to practise at one level of difficulty before moving on to the next.

Appropriate tasks promote the ability to solve problems and help to apply these skills in new situations. In addition, targeted feedback from teachers, also known as scaffolding, helps pupils to achieve a level of learning and performance that they would otherwise not be able to achieve on their own. If the relationship between teacher and pupil is trusting and free of conflict, the effect of such positive interactions is further enhanced.

What helps in a particular lesson does not necessarily help in another context.

Teachers who teach children with concentration and behavioural difficulties know how different these children can be. They have different strengths and needs, react differently to support measures and may even differ from day to day. What helps in one particular lesson may not necessarily help in another context.

However, previous research results have hardly taken such differences into account. Future studies should therefore examine the question of which measures are most effective in supporting which pupils under which conditions. These findings should help teachers to provide children like Sophie with the best possible learning conditions at all times.

This text first appeared in English on BOLD - Blog on Learning and Development.