To Succeed at School, Children With ADHD Need Both Medication and Non-Medication Treatments

The Huffington Post – Alvaro Fernandez

“Aca­d­e­mic prob­lems are extremely com­mon in chil­dren with ADHD, and often the issue that leads to refer­ral for an ADHD evaluation. Aca­d­e­mic out­comes can be mea­sured in two dif­fer­ent ways — aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment and aca­d­­emic per­for­mance — and both are com­pro­mised in chil­dren with ADHD. Aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment refers to the infor­ma­tion and skills that chil­dren acquire and is typ­i­cally mea­sured by stan­dard­ized tests. Aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance focuses on direct mea­sures of suc­cess at school such as grades, grade reten­tion, high school grad­u­a­tion, and col­lege enrollment. An impor­tant ques­tion then, for mil­lions of kids diag­nosed with ADHD and for their par­ents and edu­ca­tors, is whether long-term aca­d­e­mic func­tion­ing can improve with appro­pri­ate treat­ment.”(more)