The Task Matters: A Scoping Review on Reading Comprehension Abilities in ADHD

OBJECTIVE

A broad range of tasks have been used to classify individuals with ADHD with reading comprehension difficulties. However, the inconsistency in the literature warrants a scoping review of current knowledge about the relationship between ADHD diagnosis and reading comprehension ability.

METHOD

A comprehensive search strategy was performed to identify relevant articles on the topic. Thirty-four articles met inclusion criteria for the current review.

RESULTS

The evidence as a whole suggests reading comprehension is impaired in ADHD. The most prominent effect was found in studies where participants retell or pick out central ideas in stories. On these tasks, participants with ADHD performed consistently worse than typically developing controls. However, some studies found that performance in ADHD improved when reading comprehension task demands were low.

CONCLUSION

Results suggest that performance in ADHD depends on the way reading comprehension is measured and further guide future work clarifying why there are such discrepant findings across studies.

Implications of Error Analysis Studies for Academic Interventions

We reviewed 13 studies that focused on analyzing student errors on achievement tests from the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement–Third edition (KTEA-3). The intent was to determine what instructional implications could be derived from in-depth error analysis. As we reviewed these studies, several themes emerged. We explain how a careful analysis of errors is key to planning the most appropriate instructional interventions.

Error Analysis

This commentary will take an historical perspective on the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement (KTEA) error analysis, discussing where it started, where it is today, and where it may be headed in the future. In addition, the commentary will compare and contrast the KTEA error analysis procedures that are rooted in psychometric methodology and the process approach to error analysis which is derived primarily from cognitive neuropsychology.

Commentary

The articles presented in this Special Issue provide evidence for many statistically significant relationships among error scores obtained from the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement, Third Edition (KTEA)-3 between various groups of students with and without disabilities. The data reinforce the importance of examiners looking beyond the standard scores when analyzing results. Although the data in these articles are powerful by themselves, this commentary explores the potential advantages of considering additional information to increase the practicality of these results. Although statistical significance may provide evidential validity of the results, and the articles inform clinical practice and offer valuable leads for further research that should be pursued, the present authors question whether the data as presented provide sufficient information to determine the predictive and practical utility of these initial results. The next step, we believe, is to extend these novel approaches to data from larger, carefully defined samples of students with specific learning challenges and disabilities.