Characteristics of attention deficit disorder: Intervention versus Accommodation in teaching children with ADHD

Understanding Accommodation and Intervention? Accommodation means to change the environment to help the student be successful. Intervention means to change a child’s skill level by teaching or motivating so that he or she can perform tasks and accomplish goals more successfully.

With regards to a student with a math learning disability, and always when teaching children with ADHD or executive function disorder, a teacher must use his or her best assessment skills to examine the characteristics of attention deficit disorder in a child in order to best determine which teaching style and changes to classroom environment and would be most helpful to the student.

Sometimes only accommodation makes sense. If a child has a vision problem that can only be addressed with glasses, we get the glasses. We have changed the physical environment so he can be more successful at seeing. We didn’t teach him anything, and we didn’t try to. There wasn’t a practical way to help him grow to handle the challenge independently – we just need to give him the glasses.

Combining Accommodation and Intervention Sometimes a combination of approaches makes sense. After a foot or leg injury, a child might have a number of accommodations, such as crutches and someone to carry his bookbag, to enable him to get around. At the same time, he might have interventions such as physical therapy, stretches or exercises to develop his ability to recover quickly and well and thereby get around independently. The accommodations are enabling him to be successful while he’s in the process of developing his independence.

Very often, however, a math learning disability can be looked at from one perspective or another. For example, some characteristics of attention deficit disorder or executive function disorder could cause an eighth grade student to be unable to perform decimal operations successfully when doing the calculations with paper and pencil. (This is normally an upper elementary math skill.)

Before her math learning disability held her back from solving percent word problems, even when she got the basic idea of the problem, because of her skills weakness, but now she can.

What is an Intervention? An intervention would be to find a way to teach her how to perform decimal operations herself. In this, the accommodation is certainly a whole lot easier.

For some children it may well be the only practical approach. But with some characteristics of attention deficit disorder and with executive function disorder, often the intervention has great educational and developmental advantages.

The child is taught to face her math learning disability and overcome a challenge. Her resourcefulness and persistence are built up. Her self-esteem is developed by achieving a goal. (How do you think the calculator accommodation affects her self-esteem?)

And from the specific math learning disability perspective, learning decimal multiplication isn’t just about the immediate answer; it is about understanding how our decimal system works.

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