Ohio State University researchers report that a software package they tested shows promise in relieving some of the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.
The intervention consists of an intensive, five-week working memory training program. Researchers found significant changes for students who completed the program in areas such as attention, ADHD symptoms, planning and organization, initiating tasks, and working memory.
Add text to photo. Add name, company and brand text to images. Make a watermark with all fonts, installed in your system. Ships with up to 260 font families (depends on the app edition). Supports normal, italic, bold and bold italic font styles. Our watermark software allows you to change size and position using visual drag-n-drop editor. Monday.com is a planning and collaboration software for all types of Ad Agencies. Plan campaigns, list tasks, communicate and exchange files with your team, and share your progress with your clients including documents, assets, approval processes and campaigns performance. Monday.com empowers agencies to meet deadlines, keep clients happy, and bring in more business.
'This program really seemed to make a difference for many of the children with ADHD,' said Steven Beck, Ph.D., co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University. 'It is not going to replace medication, but it could be a useful complementary therapy.'
OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding. With the tools we provide, developers on SourceForge create powerful software in over 502,000 open source projects; we host over 2.1 million registered users. Our popular directory connects over 32 million visitors and serves more than 2.6 million software downloads a day.
Findings of the study, co-authored with graduate students Christine Hanson and Synthia Puffenberger, are published in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology.
The software is developed by Cogmed, in conjunction with the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Stockholm, Sweden. A distinctive feature of the product is the focus on improving one of the major deficiencies found in people with ADHD – working memory.
Working memory is the ability to hold onto information long enough to achieve a goal. For example, you have to remember a phone number long enough for you to dial it. Students have to remember the passage of a book they just read, in order to understand what they're currently reading.
'Working memory is critical in everyday life, and certainly for academic success, but it is one of the things that is very difficult for children with ADHD,' Hanson said.
The study involved 52 students, aged 7 to 17, who attended a private school in Columbus, Ohio, that serves children with learning disabilities, many of whom also have an ADHD diagnosis. All the children used the software in their homes, under the supervision of their parents and the researchers.
The software includes a set of 25 exercises that students had to complete within 5 to 6 weeks. Each session is 30 to 40 minutes long. The exercises are in a computer-game format and are designed to help students improve their working memory. For example, in one exercise a robot will speak numbers in a certain order, and the student has to click on the numbers the robot spoke, on the computer screen, in the opposite order.
'At first the kids love it, because it is like a game,' Puffenberger said.
'But the software has an algorithm built in that makes the exercises harder as the students get better. So the children are always challenged.'
Half the students participated at the beginning of the study. The other half was wait-listed, and completed the software program after the others were finished. Parents and teachers of the participating students completed measures of the children's ADHD symptoms and working memory before the intervention, one month after treatment, and four months after treatment.
Results showed that parents generally rated their children as improving on inattention, overall number of ADHD symptoms, working memory, planning and organization and in initiating tasks. These changes were evident both immediately after treatment and four months later.
On individual measures, between one-fourth and one-third of the children showed clinically significant progress – in other words, enough progress to be easily visible to their parents. The teacher ratings, while pointed in the direction of improvement, were not strong enough to be statistically significant in this study. That's not surprising, Beck said, because very few treatment studies ever find significance among teacher measures.
'Teachers only see the kids for a few hours a day and they are dealing with a lot of other children at the same time. It would be difficult for them to see changes,' Beck said.
Beck said this is the first published study they know of testing this software in the United States. One of the strengths of the study is that it used a very typical sample of children with ADHD – other studies in Sweden had excluded children who were on medication.
'Most kids with ADHD are on some kind of medication, so it helps to know how this intervention works in these cases,' he said. In this sample, 60 percent of the students were on medication. The results showed the program was equally effective regardless of whether they were on medication or not.
'Medication for ADHD does not help directly with working memory, and the training program does, so it can be useful,' Beck said. Update safari on macbook pro.
'One of the encouraging findings is that parents reported even ADHD symptoms improved after the program, and that isn't the focus. This program is focused on improving working memory.'
Beck said they can't say for sure how the program works to help kids with ADHD. But it seems that children are learning how to focus and how to use their working memory on everyday tasks, and they are able to use that knowledge at school and home.
One possible criticism of the study could be that it relies on parental reports, and parents tend to be biased.
Add Software In Windows 10
Beck said they can't say for sure how the program works to help kids with ADHD. But it seems that children are learning how to focus and how to use their working memory on everyday tasks, and they are able to use that knowledge at school and home.
One possible criticism of the study could be that it relies on parental reports, and parents tend to be biased.
Add Software In Windows 10
'That's true, but it is also the parents who are observing the kids day in and day out, and they are the ones who would be most likely to observe any changes that occur,' Beck said. The researchers plan on extending the work by using more objective measures of children's progress after using the program.
Source: Ohio State University
Software For Address Database
Related Articles
