Differences in On-Line Narration Between Younger (4-6) and Older (7-9) Children with ADHD and Their Nonreferred Peers.

Children with ADHD tend to be impulsive and inattentive. One of the major areas in which these characteristics are detrimental is in a school setting. Children with ADHD have trouble finishing their work, are more likely to fail courses, and drop out of school. Research suggests that these difficulties are due to this impulsiveness and inattention they exhibit. One of the major deficits that these children have is in their ability to tell a story. Research with normally developing children suggests that as children grow older, the story structure of their stories becomes more organized and abstract. Younger children’s stories tend to be concrete and less organized. According to the research, stories narrated by children with ADHD tend to resemble those of younger children without ADHD. The research on this has many limitations, however; one of these is that studies of children with ADHD mostly concentrate on older children. Research has not been done to explore the developmental differences in narrations between younger children and older children with ADHD. That is the purpose of this study. In addition, I compare the narrations of children with ADHD with narrations of children without ADHD. It is expected that the narrations of children with ADHD will have less organized, more concrete stories that resemble younger children’s narrations as shown in previous research. It is also expected that even though there are deficits in narratives of those children with ADHD, there will still be developmental improvement in narrations. The extent of improvement is not known, but is hypothesized to be less than the developmental improvement between younger and older non-referred children