Three groups of children of different ages who were considered by their teachers as showing symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and matched controls were tested in a series of expressive writing tasks, derived from a standardized writing test. In the first study, 24 sixth- and seventh-grade children with ADHD symptoms wrote a description of an image. The ADHD group's expressive writing was worse than that of the control group and associated with a higher number of errors, mainly concerning accents and geminates. The second study showed the generality of the effect by testing younger groups of children with ADHD symptoms and controls with another description task where a verbal description was substituted for the picture stimulus. The third study extended the previous observations with another type of writing task, the request of writing a narrative text. In all the three studies, children with ADHD symptoms scored lower than controls on four qualitative parameters (adequacy, structure, grammar, and lexicon), produced shorter texts, and made more errors. These studies show that children with ADHD symptoms have school difficulties also in writing-both in spelling and expression-and that these difficulties are extended to different tasks and ages.

The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of specific, individualized training for students with different levels of mathematical difficulties. Fifty-four students, with either severe or mild math difficulties, were assigned to individualized training or to a control condition. Ten students with severe math difficulties (“dyscalculia”) and 17 with mild math difficulties in the individualized training conditions were trained to improve their accuracy and fluency in math, compared to 9 students with severe math difficulties and 18 with mild math difficulties that were in the general training group (control condition). Students in the individualized training condition (both with dyscalculia and with mild math difficulties) outperformed the control groups after the training and at a later follow-up in almost all math components. Overall, this study supports the feasibility of treating both severe and mild mathematical accuracy and fluency difficulties with specific, customized training.

Even in primary school, mathematics achievement depends upon the efficiency of cognitive, metacognitive and self-regulatory processes. Thus, for pupils to carry out a computation, such as a written calculation, metacognitive mechanisms play a crucial role, since children must employ self-regulation to assess the precision of their own thinking and performance. This assessment, in turn, can be helpful in the regulation of their own learning. In this regard, a body of literature suggests that the application of psychoeducational interventions that promote the development of mathematics-related metacognitive (e.g., control) processes, based on the analysis of the students' errors, can successfully influence mathematics performance. The main objective of the current study was to investigate the impact of a metacognitive and cognitive training program developed to enhance various arithmetic skills (e.g., syntax, mental and written calculation), self-regulatory and control functions in primary and secondary school students exhibiting atypical mathematical development. Sixty-eight Italian children, 36 male and 32 female (mean age at pretest = 9.3 years, SD = 1.02 years), meeting the criteria for the diagnosis of dyscalculia or specific difficulties in mathematics, took part in the study. Of these, 34 children (i.e., experimental group) underwent the cognitive and self-regulatory intervention enhancing mathematics skills training for 16 weekly sessions. The remaining students were assigned to the control group. For a pre-test and post-test, a battery of standardized mathematical tests assessing different mathematics skills, such as written and mental operations, digit transcription and number ordering skills, was administered and provided a series of measures of calculation time and accuracy (i.e., number of errors). In the post-test, the experimental group exhibited better accuracy in written calculation and in digit transcription. Overall, the current outcomes demonstrate that psychoeducational interventions enriching metacognitive and mathematical achievements through error analysis may be an effective way to promote both the development of self-regulatory and control skills and mathematical achievement in children with atypical mathematical development.

The present study evaluated the effectiveness of a shortened, specialized, and digitally supported training program for enhancing numerical skills in primary and secondary school children with mathematical difficulty (MD). The participants ( n = 57) were randomly assigned to two groups: for the experimental group, the tasks were differentiated and adapted to each student’s learning profile. Moreover, children of this group used a Web App (i.e., “I bambini contano” or “Children count” in English) for improving arithmetic fact retrieval at home; for the control group, the difficulty of the activities was graded according to the school curriculum, and this group did not use the Web App. Pre‐ to post-training measurements showed that children of the experimental group had an improvement significantly higher than the control group, in particular in arithmetic facts and written calculation. Moreover, a follow-up evaluation indicated that the efficacy of the experimental training program lasted up to 2 months after the intervention. The results indicate that a specialized face-to-face intervention along with a digitally supported training at home can benefit children with mathematical learning difficulties.

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