Evaluating the simple view of reading for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Abstract

The "simple view of reading" is an influential model of reading comprehension that asserts that children's reading comprehension performance can be explained entirely by their decoding and language comprehension skills. Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often exhibit difficulty across all three of these reading domains on standardized achievement tests, yet it is unclear whether the simple view of reading is sufficient to explain reading comprehension performance for these children. The current study is the first to use multiple indicators and latent estimates to examine the veracity of key predictions from the simple view of reading in a clinically evaluated sample of 250 children with and without ADHD (ages 8-13, M age = 10.29, SD = 1.47; 93 girls; 70% White/non-Hispanic). Results of the full-sample structural equation model revealed that decoding and language comprehension explained all (R 2 = .99) of the variance in reading comprehension for children with and without ADHD. Further, multigroup modeling (ADHD, non-ADHD) indicated that there was no difference in the quantity of variance explained for children with ADHD versus clinically evaluated children without ADHD and that the quantity of explained variance did not differ from 100% for either group. Sensitivity analyses indicated that these effects were generally robust to control for monomethod bias, time sampling error, and IQ. These findings are consistent with "simple view" predictions that decoding and language comprehension are both necessary and together sufficient for explaining children's reading comprehension skills. The findings extend prior work by indicating that the "simple view" holds for both children with ADHD and clinically evaluated children without ADHD. Educational Impact and Implications StatementThe current findings indicate that the "simple view of reading" is helpful for understanding reading comprehension difficulties in children with ADHD. We found that reading comprehension performance is fully explained by skill at converting printed words to speech sounds (decoding) and skill at understanding spoken language (language comprehension) among children with ADHD. Future studies are needed to understand why children with ADHD have difficulties with decoding and language comprehension.

Working memory and inhibitory control deficits in children with ADHD: an experimental evaluation of competing model predictions

“…Our recruitment strategy thus emphasized participation of children in need of clinical evaluation who were, and were not, suspected of having ADHD. Recruitment of a non-ADHD clinical sample allows for more robust control for the presence of these co-occurring diagnoses in the ADHD group (i.e., it allows us to draw stronger conclusions about processes implicated in ADHD specifically as opposed to processes that may appear to be impaired in ADHD due to the confounding influence of co-occurring conditions; 88 ). Additionally, given the large number of studies examining working memory and/or inhibitory control in ADHD versus neurotypical samples, our inclusion of a clinical comparison group can be considered a strength because it extends prior work by testing the extent to which ADHD-related impairments in executive functioning are evidenced above and beyond difficulties attributable to another common form of child psychopathology.…”

The role of working memory and organizational skills in academic functioning for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

“…Missing data were low for both the ADHD (3.1%) and non-ADHD (6.6%) groups and was handled using full information maximum likelihood estimation. Task data from subsets of the current battery have been reported for subsets of the current sample to examine conceptually unrelated hypotheses (see Cole et al, 2023). Demographic information for the full sample is shown in Table 1.…”