Do College Students with ADHD have Expressive Writing Difficulties as Do Children with ADHD?

This study analyzed the expressive writing of college students. Twenty-two ADHD students and 22 controls were asked to write a story based on a picture story and a personal challenge. The texts were compared based on several qualitative and quantitative parameters. The results show that students in both groups presented similar text quality. Out of six qualitative parameters only one was statistically different between the two groups: ADHD students performed worse in adequacy, but only in the picture task. Students writings were also investigated using corpus based analysis. This analysis showed that ADHD students used less unusually frequent words in the picture story but more in the challenge task. Taken together the findings indicate no significant difference in expressive writing between ADHD and non ADHD college students. An explanation to this result is that college students with ADHD may have passed the filter of prior education