Enhancing Learning Abilities of Students with ADHD
via Art-enriched Teaching
Continual confrontation with teachers, failure at school and the resulting low esteem, combine to create a chronic condition of stress that impacts the brain in a number of ways. For instance, the neurotransmitter, gamma amino butyric acid that inhibits irrelevant stimuli (Hannaford, 2002) is blocked by adrenalin. Adrenalin is secreted during stressful conditions and so is created the opposite response to the desired one �an amplification of reaction to all stimuli. As a result, these students cannot relax and concentrate under stressful classroom conditions.
In our research, we have examined classroom conditions more conducive to successful performance by ADHD pupils.
Using Metacognition of Meaning as a Tool to Broaden Learning
Every student knows from personal experience that it is much easier to remember and recall something that he or she finds personally or emotionally meaningful. Teacher experience is much the same. Nevertheless, most of the subject matter taught in school is presented in a manner detached and without relevance to students, which in turn negates the possibility of long-term containment. Most students have managed to recruit short-term learning strategies in order to be able to recall information needed for exams. Such learning more or less disappears after the trauma of the exam has passed. This short-term learning process contraindicates any chance for a higher level of information integration and synthesis into useful knowledge, and, as well, inhibits critical thinking or application to moral considerations.
Elliot Eisner (Eisner, 1998) claims that the objectives of education are much broader than mere information and knowledge transfer. In his opinion, education is a process of discovering and assigning meaning to life. Each individual, through his own direct sensory and emotional interaction with the environment, finds an immediate meaning. The ability to represent such an experience in a multi-modal manner via language, music, image or film, dance, story, poetry, mathematical theory or formula, stems from the need of a human being to share his thoughts and feelings with his fellow human beings. The purpose of education is to expand the ability to represent the human personal experience via various modalities, and teach students to decode the meaning embedded in all information modalities available in our cultural environment.
Eisner expands the notion of literacy beyond the ability to decode and comprehend or create written text, to include the ability to decode various representations and embedded messages in the culture and arts, which contain meaning and information that cannot be readily expressed via written language symbols.
The priorities of the education system, which emphasize expression via aural and written language, as well as structured linear logic in Science and Mathematics, do not leave much room (both space and time) for other forms of multi-modal expressions, thus severely limiting their use to convey meaningful information.
Students who are gifted with structural perception (dominant right hemisphere) relate much better to visual, musical and emotional sensations and abstractions. Some of them experience difficulty in processing the set of verbal and textual information representations offered in the classroom. Hence, they are less motivated to create and produce verbal and written content and find themselves in a position where they are unable to utilize their best forms of communication and at the same time, cannot keep up with students who have a dominant logic (left) hemisphere.
Students, who, in addition, suffer from stress and related idiosyncrasies of ADHD, will experience even greater difficulty in meeting the school�s expectations and norms. This will be exacerbated when constant criticism from teachers and from their peers may lead to low self-esteem and reduced motivation, while at the same time increasing their defiance and eroding their abilities to develop meaningful social interaction, so crucial during adolescence.
Attention Deficit and the Onset of Adolescence
The physical changes that are typical to adolescence tend to start earlier in western developed countries when compared to the evidence from the last century and in relation to non-developed countries. In fact in Israel, the first signs of sexual maturity may appear in some girls as early as age 10. The accompanying hormonal secretions and accelerated rate of growth influence and modify the adolescent�s emotional and social balance.
Various studies show that in this transition period, the brain undergoes significant transitions that may include, among other things, hemispherical specialization. In addition, the brain cells (neurons) become much more effective and their response becomes faster due to the enhanced specialization or reduced functional flexibility. Logical thinking is improved and allows for a wider exploitation of hypothetical deductive thinking processes.
Piaget described this transition phase as the formal operations stage, a mode towards which adults strive, involving the development of a more abstract way of thinking and ability to use symbolic representations of hypothetical situations (for example: if A=B and B=C then A=C). The mature adult develops more control of attention and the ability to maintain selective attention focus towards a desired information stimulus, while ignoring distractions from the environment.
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