Students with ADD getting double time and private rooms on exams

[Marley23]

@saoirse

There have been. They found that classroom performance was as good or better a predictor. The problem is that classroom performance can be gamed by an aggressive parent, and will be much more often if its value is increased. The standardized tests have the advantage of being standardized.

Then again, the OP says the standardized tests are being gamed as well. And while I think it’s fine for students with learning disabilities to get extra time, I’m sure some gaming does take place.

[tagos]

At my University there is an annual outbreak of dyslexia round about the time of the summer exams.

[Stoid]

I thought you’d appreciate this from a top drawer ADD researcher, Russell Barkley:

You are also going to have to externalize time. They have no sense of time. It is laughable what I hear teachers and parents say. “Tommy, you’ve got 30 minutes to go back to your desk and do this academic work.” What is 30 minutes? You have an idea what 30 minutes is. You know how long it feels. You know when half of it is over. You don’t need a watch. They do. They have absolutely no idea what 30 minutes feels like. You just gave them a time limit. If you’re going to do that, you need to make time physical. Clocks, watches, calendars.

To someone with AD/HD time feels like it is moving very slowly, and therefore they think they have more time than they do. Let me put it the other way. The future gets here faster than they think. And consequently they are never ready for it. It is arriving faster than they can feel it coming at them. Externalize time as much as possible.

And by the way, what does this theory say about giving extra time on exams to people with AD/HD? Most common recommendation I see in high school students and college students. Double time on exams. What a joke. Go ahead. You’ll just give them twice the time to waste. Twice the time they can’t feel. Twice the time they can’t use. There’s not a single study anywhere in the literature that shows that giving extra time is an advantage to anybody with AD/HD, and there are studies of children that show that it doesn’t help them, it hurts them. To be able to use time effectively, to go back and check your work requires self-control. This person doesn’t have it. So you’re going to have to put some motivation at the point of performance.

It’s a lazy answer to the question of how to help ADD kids deal with their ADD. But of course, this little chunk is part of a much larger talk about his theories, which, (Correctly, in my view) call ADD a disorder of self-control rather than attention.

[Stoid]

A little more, becaus I see this is a topic of some interest:

Does he have AD/HD? Yes. Are we going to excuse it? Not on your life. Because if you think this theory of mine excuses accountability, you just missed a very big point. My theory says the opposite. If you want to help somebody with this disorder, you don’t excuse the consequences. You move them up as close as possible to the behavior you’re trying to control. You increase accountability, not decrease it, not dismiss it. That is the worst thing you could do for anybody with AD/HD is to not hold them accountable.

If being accountable means that there are consequences for your actions more immediately, more often, and more saliently, then that is what this theory says you must do. You must increase the accountability and bring it up close to the behavior you are trying to manage, not dismiss it and excuse it as if they can’t help it and never will be able to. You arrange the right contingencies around somebody with AD/HD and they can act normal. You excuse accountability and they will be in the most serious trouble they’ve ever been in, because this theory says this: it ain’t the consequences that are the problem; it’s the delay to the consequences that kill them. It is the lag in those natural consequences that is always the problem for them. What is the consequence for not doing your school work? Retention in grade and failing high school. That’s a nine month to twelve year lag. What does my theory say? Tighten it up. Consequences every day in this class for getting that work done or not. And then they get to the future. And they don’t get held back and they don’t fail high school.

AD/HD is not a pathology, it’s a trait. There is an AD/HD trait in the population. It’s called selfcontrol, and AD/HD represents the lower end of that trait. Just as dyslexia is not a category, but is simply the lower end of the distribution of phonologic awareness and decoding. And just as mental retardation is the lower end of the distribution of IQ in the population, AD/HD is just the lower end of a normal Bell Curve for self-control in the population. It’s not like pregnancy, not something you have or you don’t. It’s a continuum. And they happen to occupy the extreme end of the continuum of a normal trait.

For people with a compelling interest in this subject, I strongly urge you to seek out this guy’s data about this, because you will have your whole view turned around.

[VarlosZ]

But unfortunately colleges are not told this information when they see students’ scores.

Are we sure that this is true? I took the PSAT untimed and got the highest score in my class ( brag! :D), but there was a big fat asterisk next to my score when the results came in. I didn’t use the extra time and didn’t like that asterisk, so I decided to take the SATs in the traditional way. (Highest score again, until someone else took it a second time and crushed me by like 80 points.)