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With her long dark hair flying, Saorla Meenagh, 10, (pictured above) can execute a perfect switch leap, one leg out, one tucked under, her arms glued to her sides in classic Irish step-dancing style. Saorla, whose blue eyes, white skin, and sprinkle of freckles helped win her a modeling contract with a New York agency-on hold until her braces come off -also plays softball and Gaelic football, a soccer-like game her father, Seamus, a contractor, enjoyed when he was growing up in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

When asked her position on the team, Saorla wiggles in her seat at the family's dining room table. "I don't know-random positions," she says, as her mother, Kerri, a pediatric nurse practitioner quietly pushes her daughter's bare foot off the table where it has wandered for what may be the 10th time in half an hour. During that time, Saorla's actions are as scattered as pool balls in a break. She sits on her knees, then jiggles, then rocks, then circles photos in a stack of food magazines with a pen, turning off the TV, turning up the TV, turning down the TV, and making part of a bracelet on a Rainbow Loom before she finally loses interest. She rarely finishes a task and being with her can be as disconcerting as watching television with someone pressing the channel changer every 10 seconds.

Along with a gift for math and a love for Gaelic sports, Saorla has inherited something else from her father: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD. People just meeting her find her adorably sweet, if quirky. But if she's not on her medication-which she isn't at the moment because we met at her family's home in a Philadelphia suburb during the summer-she is an exhausting ball of boundless energy. (While she's not at school, her mother gives her a medication holiday in order to boost her appetite, help her gain weight and grow, all things Vyvance interferes with.) "When we had her tested they said that in 20 years she was the most hyperactive child they ever tested," says Meenagh, gently removing that errant foot from the table yet again.

But Saorla's perpetual motion isn't what concerns Meenagh the most. Being fidgety and easily distracted are two of the most common and recognized symptoms of ADHD, often leading to poor performance in school, the most recognized fallout of the condition. But the 5% to 11% of American children 4 to 17 years of age who are diagnosed with the disorder-the numbers are up for debate depending on whom you talk to-also face a lifetime of increased risk for accidents, teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, smoking, and even dying prematurely. Overall, boys (13.2%) are more likely than girls (5.6%) to be given an ADHD diagnosis.

It's the fear for her child's future that makes Meenagh bristle when she hears someone-family, friends, strangers, even scientists-say that ADHD doesn't exist, that the symptoms are caused by poor parenting, food additives, or 21 st century life in the fast lane, lack of physical activity, or that they're just kids being kids, albeit less manageable than most. "A lot of people don't believe in it," she says. "I think that's because they've never experienced it firsthand."

To those naysayers, C. Keith Connors, professor emeritus of medical psychology at Duke University and creator of the Connors Rating Scales for diagnosing ADHD, says he always offers the same challenge: "Take one of these kids on a car trip for a day and see how you feel about it then."

It's easy to see why some dismiss ADHD as simply an artifact of modern life. After all, we're all on the information Autobahn. Most Americans are exposed to an average of 100,000 words a day-about the length of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn-very little of which we're able to absorb, according to a 2009 study on America's information consumption from the University of California, San Diego. We're also asked from a very young age to be still, nearly motionless, except for the tapping of our fingers on the computer keys. Ours is not a society tolerant of perpetual motion or daydreaming. At some point, we're all like the dog in the Pixar movie, Up, doing one thing and then responding to the real-life equivalent of "Squirrel!"

But ADHD isn't a disorder of the modern age. It may have been first described in the medical literature in 1763 by Scottish physician Sir Arthur Crichton, who observed patients so unable to focus that "the barking of dogs, an ill-tuned organ, or the scolding of women, are sufficient to distract patients of this description to such a degree, as almost approaches to the nature of delirium." Those patients, he noted, referred to their own symptoms, including anger "bordering on insanity," as "the fidgets."

The argument doesn't hold up either when ADHD's worldwide prevalence is factored in. It's found in developing countries, where the information speed limit is slower and the requirement to be sedentary 24/7 doesn't exist.

Yet there's an undeniable backlash against the diagnosis. Earlier this year, Chicago neurologist and ADHD specialist Dr. Richard Saul published a provocatively titled book, ADHD Does Not Exist, in which he proposes that ADHD is not an entity in itself but a cluster of symptoms that stem from more than 20 other conditions, including depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many of those, along with dysfunctional behavior conditions such as oppositional defiant disorder, characterized by aggression, tantrums and a propensity to argue with adults, and learning disabilities such as dyslexia, are often diagnosed as co-illnesses with ADHD. Saul criticizes the catchall-nature of an ADHD diagnosis, which he believes corrals a lot of real conditions into one.

Saul's theories hit home with a lot of people who are worried about statistics showing an increase in the number of ADHD diagnoses in the U.S. and the number of prescriptions filled every year for relatively powerful stimulant drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall and a host of new medications. Though these drugs are generally considered safe, they do have side effects, including anxiety-sometimes even paranoia-weight loss, insomnia, and growth retardation (about half an inch, which doesn't appear to be permanent). In some rare cases they can damage the heart. Since many of the drugs are appetite killers, some parents have to entice their children with small meals all day long. The side effects are why many children like Saorla take medication holidays during summer months or even on the weekends. They're also why doctors and parents have to carefully weigh whether the problems a child has if he or she goes unmedicated are worth the risk.

How prevalent has an ADHD diagnosis become? A survey of 76,000 parents conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) every four years estimates that one in 11 children had been diagnosed with ADHD by a health care professional, an increase of 42% between 2003 and 2014. "[That number] is preposterous," says Connors, who studied and treated ADHD for 50 years before retiring. "That would make it an epidemic." (See a map of ADHD prescriptions in the U.S.: What's With ADHD in the South)

One possible explanation for the frequency of the diagnosis is that the data collection method is imperfect. The National Survey of Children's Health is a phone survey and the figures on ADHD are collected on the basis of the answers to one question: "Has a doctor or other health care provider ever told you that [your child] had attention deficit disorder or attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, that is, ADD or ADHD?" The type of "other health care provider" isn't established. ADHD experts say it is often a pediatrician who does not spend the kind of time it takes to make an accurate diagnosis. The gold standard of ADHD diagnosis is an analysis of questionnaires, like those Connors developed, filled out by parents, teachers and other people who interact with the child and observe classroom behavior. Each child can take hours to analyze.

"That's a luxury a pediatrician doesn't have," says Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, MD, who founded the NYU Study Center and is founding president of the nonprofit Child Mind Institute in New York City. 'They get seven minutes face to face, [the doctor gives] them a prescription, and then 30 days later they come back to get it renewed."

(The CDC, however, defends its figures. They say the numbers from their parent survey hold up when they're compared to their own separate, more scientific study looking at insurance claims and field assessments. In this case, scientists in the field do a full 2.5-hour diagnostic evaluation of students for ADHD and other conduct and mental health disorders in 10,000 schools across the country, says epidemiologist Susanna Visser of the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. "We come up with a similar estimate-8.5 to 10%," she says.)

And the drug stats aren't in question. The percentage of children taking drugs jumped by more than a quarter, from 4.8% of the population between 4 and 17 to 6.1% between 2007 and 2011 according to the CDC's survey. In fall 2011 and spring 2012, there was even a brief shortage of ADHD drugs, particularly generics, because the demand was outpacing the supply.

Along with quickie diagnoses in a pediatrician's office, part of the problem seems to stem from a misunderstanding of ADHD symptoms and the methods used to diagnose the disorder. The diagnosis is based on a checklist, found in the "bible" of mental health, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), of 18 possible symptoms, any of which could describe the average child-even the average adult-some of the time. They include acting before thinking, being unable to delay gratification, staying motived to finish a boring task, keeping strong emotions in check, remembering an assignment and how to complete it, or planning ahead.

But three other factors play a pivotal role in determining whether a child has a disorder or is just quirky, inattentive, or high-spirited. To be diagnosed with ADHD, children must have most of those 18 symptoms, most of the time, in most areas of their lives, from home to school to the neighborhood playground.

"And, most important, there must be impairment," says leading ADHD expert Russell Barkley, PhD, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. "They must be unable to function as well as others-and in fact, are often well below normal-in any of those domains."

Fourteen-year-old Zoe Williams "is just a fireball," says her mother, Monnica Williams, a Louisville, Kentucky, psychologist who has five children, three of whom have been diagnosed with ADHD. "She's the kid in the middle of the dance floor that all the other kids are watching, And she talks and talks and talks. Sometimes I have to say, 'Zoe, it's not that I don't want to hear what you have to say, but Mom needs a little talking timeout.'"

While kids with ADHD can be gregarious, their impulsiveness can create problems, often alienating others, including siblings, teachers, and classmates. They don't wait their turn, interrupt others, are easily frustrated, take wild risks, and their emotions can spill over like water at a rolling boil: They may be hot-headed, lash out violently, or have temper tantrums. All of this carries enormous social cost in school and on the playground.

Like autism, ADHD symptoms fall along a spectrum from mild to severe, so it's difficult to define what's typical. But, in general, for a child with attention deficits, trying to focus on one thing is akin to trying to discern the chirping of crickets in Times Square. They're forgetful, tend to procrastinate, and are disorganized. They have a hard time putting in the time and effort to achieve a goal, particularly if it's something like finishing a school project on a topic that doesn't interest them. (Paradoxically, they can also hyperfocus at times, confusing parents who can't understand why a child who can reach the 60 th level of World of Warcraft can't remember homework assignments or follow a simple set of instructions.)

Some are chronically late. "People with ADHD are blind to the future, which is why they never have anything done on time," says Barkley. "If you have an ADHD practice, a third of your patients are late or never show." (Those practices usually include adults; most ADHD symptoms persist into adulthood, though they may be milder.)

ADHD is divided into subtypes-children just with attention problems, those with impulse control and hyperactivity issues, and a group with a combination of the two. The latter is the most common, occurring in two-thirds to three-quarters of people, estimates Barkley.

Children with attention problems can have any or all of these symptoms, but may not be any more fidgety than the average child. Sometimes they're labeled merely ADD. On the other hand, children who are hyperactive as well as distractible may not be able to stop moving or even to stop talking, including to themselves. An internal conversation for most people can become a conference call on speakerphone for a child with ADHD.

So it's no surprise that the average ADHD-afflicted child has one to two negative interactions per minute with the people in their lives, says William Pelham, director of the Center for Children and Families at Florida International University who has authored or co-authored more than 300 papers on ADHD. "What that means is that most of these kids' interactions with other people are negative. They're not the ones invited to birthday parties or over to another kid's house to play."

That kind of rejection can be damaging to a child's self-esteem and heartbreaking for parents. "Saorla is such a good kid, such an empathetic kid, but if she's tired, she becomes 'Hurricane Saorla,'" says Meenagh. The minute Saorla learned to walk she climbed-everything, and not skillfully. She was impulsive, fearless and, probably as a result, accident-prone. The Meenaghs once had to call the police and fire department to get Saorla, then a toddler, out of a bathroom where she had barricaded herself behind a locked door and a drawer she pulled out.

During a class visit to the zoo, Saorla, who has trouble transitioning from one activity to another, balked at moving from one exhibit with the rest of the children and threw a classic "big blowout" tantrum-kicking and screaming-while her mother hauled her away. It's not unusual, says Meenagh, for those outbursts to go on for an hour.

"I was very aware that everyone was looking at us," she says. "I was mortified, but mainly I was scared that she was going to be labeled by the other parents as a kid other kids shouldn't be friends with."

Saorla does have friends, Meenagh is quick to note, but they're not her 10-year-old classmates at the local K-8 Catholic parochial school she attends. "She operates more at a seven-year-old level so her friends tend to be younger," says Meenagh. "She can be very silly-silly to the point that her classmates say she's too silly for them."

As much as Meenagh frets over her child's feelings now, she worries even more about Saorla's future. "I've read a lot about teenage girls with ADHD, how they don't fit in socially, how they have four to five times the rate of teen pregnancy and are four to five times more likely to be in car accidents. I worry about how this is going to play out."

Meenagh's fears are well-founded, says Barkley, author of Taking Charge of ADHD and several other books on raising difficult children and teens. "This is a very serious disorder." He rattles off a catalog of scary statistics: "As adults, people with ADHD are five times more likely to speed and three times more likely to have their licenses revoked than other people. They're more likely to experience accidental injuries-burns, poisoning, traffic accidents, all kinds of trauma-than other people. In fact, having ADHD makes you three times more likely to be dead by the age of 45."

Barkley is aware that he sounds alarmist, but he has good reason. ADHD struck close to home, and with tragic consequences. "I lost my twin brother, Ron, to it," he says. His brother was killed in a one-car accident after drinking. He was not wearing a seatbelt. "This isn't just professional for me, it's personal."

To say that ADHD is sometimes misdiagnosed-even over-diagnosed-is likely true, say many experts. But to say that it doesn't exist, as some critics claim, is "like saying the world is flat," says Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist who treats ADHD at The Hallowell Centers in Cambridge, MA, and New York City and who has ADHD himself. "Those days are over. Today we have brain scans, genetic studies, twin studies that show that this is a highly inherited neurobiological disorder, not some made-up condition." Most of the doctors who treat people with ADHD agree that of course the condition exists, even if others like Richard Saul dispute it.

Sophisticated neuroimaging technology has allowed us to see what Crichton's 18 th century patients called "the fidgets" in the brain. Today, scientists believe most ADHD can be traced to a malfunction that develops in brain circuitry that controls what is broadly known as "executive functions" like planning, inhibition, and self-control. This master control board is located in the prefrontal cortex, the forward of the brain just below the forehead, and in the basal ganglia, the clusters of nerve cells found far deeper in the brain's gray matter.

Those regions work like the brain's filter; they regulate, among other things, impulse control, attention, the ability to resist distractions, rein in the emotions, think before acting, awareness of time, motivation and motion. If the filter is too porous, too many stimuli get through. "The way I describe it is that it's like having a Ferrari engine for a brain, but with bicycle brakes," says Hallowell.

Scans show that those brain regions in children with ADHD are smaller than they are in children in the general population. In one 2007 study done jointly by the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health and McGill University in Montreal, brain scans of 223 children with ADHD showed that the thickening of cortical tissue was delayed by about three years compared to scans of a control group of equal numbers of normally developing youngsters. Size doesn't matter when it comes to intelligence-many children, like Saorla, have above average IQs-though it clearly has a major impact on behavior.

The ultimate source of these brain differences is likely genes-perhaps thousands of them. The heritability of ADHD is striking. Studies have found that children who have one parent with ADHD have up to a 50% chance of also having it and siblings are between five to seven times more likely to share it. (Saorla's older sister, Aisling, 12, beat those odds.) A large, British twin study, found that the heritability of ADHD approaches 80%. That means that 80% of the time, ADHD is an inherited (not an environmentally caused) condition, making it slightly less heritable than autism, around 90%, but about as genetically programmed as height.

"There are anywhere from 25 to 45 genes that are considered high-candidate genes for ADHD," says Barkley. "But there are several we're reliably sure of, and some of those are the genes related to dopamine regulation in the brain."

Dopamine is the brain's chemical messenger that is probably best known for its role in addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, even, arguably, chocolate. But this chemical that carries information between nerve cells plays a far more important function in human life than providing us with a cocaine or cupcake high. It uses reward-the pleasurable feelings it supplies-to motivate us to pay attention, avoid distraction, to pick out the most relevant information circulating in short-term memory when solving a problem or completing a task. It also governs motion. The uncontrollable tremors in Parkinson's patients, for example, are caused by lack of dopamine. Without dopamine, we might starve to death: It's what motivates us to eat.

There are dopamine receptors on certain neurons (nerve cells) to which dopamine delivers its various messages, such as pay attention, control yourself, feel good, and do that thing that made you feel good again, the latter reflecting its role in promoting both addiction and learning. Dopamine transporters also protrude from the neurons that produce dopamine. Barkley describes them as "little vacuum cleaners" that absorb the unused dopamine in the brain so it can be used again.

One particular gene, DAT-1, has been implicated in both ADHD and bi-polar disorder and is very active in the basal ganglia and pre-frontal cortex, the brain regions that are smaller in people with ADHD. "DAT-1 genes build the dopamine transporters," explains Barkley. "A certain version of that gene that's longer than normal produces too many of those transporters-those vacuum cleaners-that are sucking up dopamine like there's no tomorrow before it even has a chance to bind to dopamine receptors. " Without dopamine, a personmay have difficulty learning and focusing, might have low motivation and become depressed.

There may also be mutations in dopamine-related genes that make neurons less receptive to dopamine's effects, he says. What that means is that in people with ADHD, there's less motivation-and pleasurable reward-for focusing, remembering, learning, planning ahead, and sitting still.

Other genes recently linked to the disorder strengthen the idea that ADHD is a fundamental communication system gone awry, a short-circuiting of the transmission between cells.

There are some non-genetic risk factors for ADHD: premature birth, maternal smoking and alcohol use, lead exposure, frequent maternal infections during pregnancy, and brain injuries. A 2009 German study found a significant link between having eczema, a rash caused by allergies, and developing ADHD symptoms, giving more credence to a controversial theory that at least some ADHD is the result of allergies or sensitivities to certain foods, food additives, or other environmental chemicals. Organophosphate pesticides-the kind used on most of the U.S. food supply-were linked to an increased risk of ADHD in a 2010 Harvard School of Public Health study which found that higher concentrations of pesticides in a child's urine doubled the child's chances of being diagnosed with the disorder. The takeaway: eat organic produce or at least wash your veggies. (See other approaches to try)

At most, however, these nongenetic factors only account for about 20% to 30% of cases, says Barkley. Ultimately, he believes, it will be genetic research that leads to more accurate diagnosis and treatment of ADHD, "telling us what caused a particular case and what drug to put someone on."

Perhaps more important, both the brain and gene research has given parents like Monnica Williams a way to fight back against the ignorance they encounter from the strangers in the supermarket who tell them they must be feeding their children too much sugar or, in Williams' case, the pastor who recommends regular spankings.

"I got lots and lots of advice from friends and family and well-meaning busybodies telling me that all they needed was more discipline, more structure, a change in diet. My kids have structure, discipline, and they're all eating natural organic food," says Williams, whose oldest son has ADHD and at the age of four, drew up an escape plan to get out of his daycare center. He made it to the front office before he was stopped. He recently graduated from Penn with a degree in physics. "ADHD is not just another word for bad parenting."

One of the clues that lead researchers to look at the dopamine genes as possible markers of ADHD is the effect of methylphenidate-the drug known as Ritalin, a central nervous system stimulant and one of the early drugs used to treat ADHD. "Ritalin blocks those transformers that remove dopamine from the brain," says Barkley. "That increases the amount of time that dopamine has to bind to neuron receptors."

And in 70% to 90% of children who take Ritalin or one of the other stimulant drugs prescribed for ADHD, there's an instant behavior change: They can focus, control their emotions, keep internal conversations from becoming constant babble, and sit still long enough to learn. The meds aren't perfect though. "Their attention is still shorter than average with medication," says Koplewicz. "They're closer to average but not better than average."

But the drugs work so well on symptoms that sales barely slowed in 2006 when the FDA-briefly-required them to carry a black box warning because of a small number (less than 50 over 10 years) of reported deaths, mostly related to heart damage. Another FDA panel withdrew the black box warning within a month.

So why does stimulant medication given to high-energy kids calm them down? That's what baffled physician Charles Bradley in 1937 when he gave benzedrine, the only stimulant available at the time, to neurologically impaired kids for the severe headaches they suffered as the result of neurological exams during which most of the cerebrospinal fluid around their brains was drained. Benzedrine-known in '60s drug parlance as "bennies"-did nothing for their headaches, but it did improve their behavior and school performance and in some even tamed their fidgeting and emotional outbursts.

Today we know that stimulants such as Ritalin, Adderall and Vyvanse, like other drugs, have the opposite effect on children than the one they have on adults. For adults, they're "speed"; in children with ADHD, they act more like a powerful new set of brakes for that racing Ferrari engine. (There's no conclusive evidence that amphetamine drugs do anything beneficial for kids who don't have ADHD.)

The proliferation of prescriptions has alarmed both conventional experts in ADHD who believe the drugs are godsends and their medical opposites who think they're unnecessary. Moving cautiously is important, they say, not just because the drugs can have serious side effects, but also because they don't cure ADHD. Diet, exercise, parenting techniques and therapy are extremely important as well.

Yet the majority of children with ADHD are getting only medication. "And we've known for 40 years that drugs [alone] don't change any of the bad outcomes for which ADHD kids are at risk," says the Center For Children and Family's Pelham. "It improves the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistic Manual] symptoms, but it doesn't improve impairment. Giving a child a pill doesn't change parenting or social skills. Achievement in school is just as bad as if they haven't had any treatment. The probability of graduating is exactly the same and it's not good." In other words, drugs don't work on outcomes without the other piece of the puzzle-behavioral training that involves good parenting skills. (Drug Guide: Choosing the Right Medication)

Parents turn to drugs alone for a number of reasons. First, most of the pills work almost immediately to reduce the worst symptoms and they're fairly easy to get. They're usually covered by insurance, which makes them cheaper and less labor-intensive than going to parenting classes to learn science-based techniques that can change a child's behavior or chauffeuring a kid to weekly therapy to learn appropriate social skills.

Parenting and behavior therapy is "a much longer term process, but it's what lays down new neuronal skills based on learning which is much different than taking a pill that lets in a flood of dopamine and changes the child's brain for a moment," says Pelham.

Experts such as Pelham, Koplewicz, Hallowell, and Barkley are all proponents of medication, but not necessarily as a first-line treatment.

Pelham was part of the large, federally-sponsored, multi-site Multimodal Treatment of ADHD (MTA) study in the '90s which found that medications alone and a combination of drug and behavioral treatment were both superior to both behavioral therapy alone and to management of children with ADHD by a regular, non-specialist pediatrician.

He laments that the takeaway from the MTA research has been that pills alone work. His own research found that just under 40% of children who start with parent and behavioral therapy often don't need medication, and those that still do, can get by with lower dosages.

Pelham and other experts hold that while bad parenting doesn't cause ADHD, good parenting can help mitigate it. Research has produced evidence that good parenting can even trump bad genes. For example, in a 2012 study, University of Oregon scientists looked at the effects of parenting styles on children ages 18-21 months and later with children 3-4 years old, with the dopamine-related 7 repeat allele gene, which occurs in about 25% of children with ADHD. They found that children whose parents scored highest in "parent effectiveness"-meaning how supportive they were and how well they interacted with their children-were less likely to have symptoms such as inattention and excessive risk-taking than children of parents who had lower scores.

Pelham's program-and there are other, similar ones, many community- and school-based-involves eight to 12 weeks of training, and most of it is for parents, not kids. Mothers and fathers learn to use positive reinforcement to encourage good behavior, age-appropriate punishments such as time-outs and loss of privileges to discourage bad behavior and a daily report card prepared by a child's teacher that emphasizes a child's successes on that day. They also learn how to give instructions to a child whose short-term (working) memory is impaired and who finds it tougher than normal to keep distractions at bay. Parents practice ways to minimize their responses to minor annoyances-like a 10-year-old who repeatedly puts her feet on the dining room table.

"Evidence of the past decade is that what improves parent-child interactions helps a child with ADHD do better," says Child Mind's Koplewicz, who uses similar techniques in his practice. "Parents who focus on the negatives reinforce negative behavior. How many times do you say, 'Are you deaf? Didn't you hear me tell you to clean up your room?' instead of 'thank you for cleaning up your room' when they do it? I have kids who come into my office and when you ask them if they're a good boy or a bad boy they say they're bad because that's their experience with the world. This does not help."

In a column published recently in the New York Times, Richard A. Friedman, director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, drew on the Kenya study, to suggest that many children with the genetic version of ADHD might benefit from education plans tailored to their needs for hands-on, fast-paced experiences high in novelty that, while unlikely to reduce their need for medication, could turn their disability into an asset.

Kerri Meenagh was fortunate. She'd learned about ADHD when she was studying for her pediatric nursing degree. But she still needed to spend time with the local school psychologist and a parent group called CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention-Deficient/Hyperactivity Disorder) to remind her how important it was to never consider Saorla a willful and disobedient child. "We need to remember that the way her brain works is different," she says. "It's not that she won't control herself, it's that she can't. "

That, she said, changed some of the expectations she and her husband have for their daughter-and themselves.

"We're both Catholics, so one of our goals was to go to Mass every Sunday. While most kids can find something to occupy them for 45 minutes at Mass, Saorla has to go to the bathroom at least three times. So we go to Mass and Saorla has to go to the bathroom three times. It doesn't matter-every Sunday we meet our goal," she says. "You adjust your expectations. I know she's disorganized and forgetful and will spill her juice or milk every day. If I know that happens because she has a brain disorder, why would I get upset?"

The fact is, she takes delight in her daughter's exuberance and individualism. "She sometimes puts together some interesting outfits but she really doesn't care what other people think about her. I'm happy she's her own person."

And Saorla seems to gravitate towards activities that channel some of her risk taking and her copious energy, particularly performing. "When they told the third graders this year that they could try out for the school musical, she was one of only two third graders who tried out for the lead," says Meenagh, laughing. "Her sister was horrified at her audacity. She didn't get the lead, but she did get a speaking part. And she was a hit."

When it comes to Irish dancing or performing, Saorla is an audience magnet. Her energy and expression make her a delight to watch. "And she seems to know that this is a way she can have positive experiences with people," says Meenagh. "They really enjoy her. Performing makes her feel proud of herself and very confident. All that energy is more acceptable on stage and that's where she feels at home."

Nationally, the rates of ADHD diagnoses and medical treatment are on the rise, but the CDC's map reveals dramatic differences between states, with a prevalence of ADHD diagnosis and drug treatment in the south.

What's at work here? That's what Stephen Hinshaw, PhD, vice chair of psychology in the department of psychiatry at the University of California in Berkeley wanted to know when he teamed with Berkeley health economist Richard M. Scheffler PhD, to drill down into the statistics. Here's what they found:

* Policy Change They traced the bump in ADHD diagnosis and treatment to education policies implemented in the south and midwest in the 1990s and the whole country after No Child Left Behind was introduced in 2001. These policies punished schools, usually by cutting their funding, if they didn't raise their kids' test scores. That meant there was a payoff if states with increased ADHD diagnoses, says Hinshaw, particularly among the poor where they rose an astonishing 60% between 2003 and 2007, compared to only 10% among kids from middle and upper class families. For one thing, a diagnosis can lead to treatment that could help underachieving students do better in the classroom and, as a result, increase mean test scores.

* Funding But "the more nefarious explanation," says Hinshaw, is that school districts pick up a get out of jail free card by having more children diagnosed with ADHD. Thanks to a Supreme Court Ruling, kids with ADHD are considered special education students whose test scores are not taken into account when a district's performance is tallied. Having a lot of students diagnosed with ADHD allows the districts to simply drop the scores of their lowest achievers and not lose any funding. "This was what policy people call an unintended consequence," says Hinshaw. "I'm sure the authors of No Child Left Behind didn't plan for this to happen."

* Poverty Many of the districts with the highest rate of ADHD are also districts with a lot of folks living within 200% of the poverty line. Once ADHD was considered a "white middle class boy" diagnosis," says Hinshaw, but since the 1990s, it has been a reimbursable condition under Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for the poor. However, Medicaid covers ADHD assessments and medication, but not other therapies which may also explain why rates of drug treatment are also on the rise. "As a result of all these policies and laws, Medicaid kids are more likely to have an ADHD diagnosis than middle class kids for the first time in history," says Hinshaw. There may be other environmental factors that account for the statistical rise in ADHD, says Hinshaw, "but right now, this is as close to a smoking gun as we've got."

Parents often go through a period of trial and error as they and their doctor try to find the right medication for their child. Here are some of the pros and cons of the most popular ADHD drugs
Stimulants

How they work: Increase levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain, stimulating cognition, attention and focus

* Ritalin and Methlphenidate-based Drugs
Ritalin LA, Ritalin SR, Methylin, Metadate, Focalin, Concerta, Quillivant XR

Duration: Lasts from 3-4 hours (Ritalin) to 10 hours (Quivallent XR)

Pros: Effective in 755 of the people who take it. The drug can be safely used in preschoolers. Newer, longer-lasting, once-a-day medications are available, including Ritalin LA, Ritalin SR, Metadate CD and Metadate ER, Concerta, Daytrana (a patch); Focalin XR, (a capsule filled with pellets that can be opened and hidden in food), and Quivallent XR, (a liquid)

Cons: May be habit-forming; can cause slowed growth, loss of appetite and weight, irritability, and surge of ADHD symptoms (called rebound symptoms) as it wears off. Ritalin and generics must be taken 2 to 3 times a day. They can increase anxiety and tics and are not as effective in toddlers as they are in older children; greater risk of side effects for younger children. Very rare side effects include sudden death.

* Adderall (mixed amphetamine)
Adderall XR, Vyvanse

Duration: 4-5 hours (Adderall) to 10-12 hours (Adderall RX, Vyvanse)

Pros: Effective in individuals who need a stronger drug than Ritalin, particularly teens and adults. Adderall XR and Vyvanse wear off more slowly with fewer rebound symptoms. Vyvanse is a once-daily pill for children 6 years and older.

Cons: May be habit-forming; can cause slowed growth, loss of appetite and weight, irritability, and restlessness. Very rare side effects include sudden death.

*Dexedrine, Dextrostat, Dexedrine Spansul

Duration: 4-5 hours (Dexedrine, Dextrostat) to 5-10 hours (Dexedrine Spansul)

Pros: Approved for children under six, slightly longer-acting than Ritalin. Dexedrine Spansul can eliminate mid-day doses in young children.

Cons: May be habit-forming and has the same potential side effects as other stimulants (see above.)

Nonstimulants

How they work: Increases dopamine circulating in the blood by decreasing blood pressure. Intuniv and Tenex may be combined with a stimulant for children who are very hyperactive, aggressive, and emotionally explosive.

* Strattera
blood pressure drugs Intuniv (time-released guanfacine; Tenex), Clonidine, Catapres, Kapvay; and some antidepressants

Duration: Up to 24 hours

Pros: These nonhabit-forming drugs can be an alternative to stimulants, though they're usually used with them. They target specific symptoms like extreme hyperactivity and aggressiveness. Blood pressure drugs can also help children sleep and may treat anxiety, nervous habits and tics, and bedwetting.

Cons: Can be sedating. Clonidine drugs have cardiac effects that may make them inappropriate for children. Antidepressants can increase suicidal thoughts and actions in children and teens.

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With her long dark hair flying, Saorla Meenagh, 10, (pictured above) can execute a perfect switch leap, one leg out, one tucked under, her arms glued to her sides in classic Irish step-dancing style.

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reflective, deliberate, reactive brain - Google Search

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reflective, deliberative , reactive brain reflective, deliberate , reactive brain

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Executive skills

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Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University

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Executive function and self-regulation (EF/SR) skills provide critical supports for learning and development, and while we aren't born with these skills, we are born with the potential to develop them through interactions and practice.

This 16-page guide (available for download, below), describes a variety of activities and games that represent age-appropriate ways for adults to support and strengthen various components of EF/SR in children.

Each chapter of this guide contains activities suitable for a different age group, from infants to teenagers. The guide may be read in its entirety (which includes the introduction and references) or in discrete sections geared to specific age groups.

Suggested citation: Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University (2014). Enhancing and Practicing Executive Function Skills with Children from Infancy to Adolescence. Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu.

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Enhancing and Practicing Executive Function Skills with Children from Infancy to Adolescence

An activities guide for building executive function

Download PDF

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Activities Guide: Enhancing & Practicing Executive Function Skills

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Download free guides of executive functioning activities to support and strengthen skills, available for children ages six months through adolescence.

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Sarah-Jayne BlakemoreatTEDGlobal 2012The mysterious workings of the adolescent brain

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Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: The mysterious workings of the adolescent brain

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Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically "teenage" behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain.

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Secrets of the teenage brain: a psychologist's guide for teachers

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Teenagers think differently to grownups - they are more likely to take risks, be sleepy, misread emotions, give in to peer-pressure and lack self-control. Thanks to advances in technology, we have been able to peer inside the teenage brain and see more clearly how it works. So what have we discovered? And how can teachers use this information to help young people navigate the challenges of growing up and getting an education?

Teenagers take risks

Let's play a game. I will give you £5 for free. In a bag in front of you there are blue and red tokens. You don't know how many tokens are blue and how many are red. If you draw out a blue token, you double your money. If you draw out a red, you lose your free £5. Would you do it?

This was essentially the question posed by researchers to teenage and adult participants. They found that when the odds of success aren't known, teenagers are far more likely to gamble.

The authors of the review take pains to point out that "adolescents' greater involvement than adults in risk-taking does not stem from ignorance, irrationality, delusions of invulnerability, or faulty calculations." So where does it come from?

Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's TED talk on the subject has been viewed more than 1.7 million times. Her research found that during adolescence, the pre-frontal cortex - the area of the brain associated with self-regulation, conscious decision-making, memory, judgment and insight (among other things) - is still developing. Teenagers, therefore, do not have the self-control to not take risks, even if they know something is risky.

Teaching tip: Teachers could tap into teenagers' risky mindset to help them do better at school. Taking risks and choosing difficult tasks is one of the benefits associated with having a growth mindset. If teachers guide this risky behaviour by encouraging pupils to take chances in a safe and secure environment, the students could challenge themselves more.

One of the biggest barriers to taking risks is a fear of failure. This can be overcome by facilitating an environment where students know mistakes won't be mocked or criticised.

This resource looks at how we can help develop a growth mindset.

Teenagers struggle to get enough sleep

During her teenage years, musician Adele almost got excluded from school for continually turning up late. She said: "I wasn't doing anything. I wasn't bunking, I just couldn't wake up." But research shows that a good night's rest is essential for learning: students who consistently get a good night's sleep get better grades.

The National Sleep Foundation suggests that teenagers need more sleep (8-10 hours) than adults (7-9 hours). Most adults start to get sleepy at about 10pm. This is because there is an increase in the sleep hormone, melatonin, at around this time. But this increase happens later in teenagers, meaning they don't feel tired until later. As many students have to get up before 8am, this means there is insufficient time to get the necessary hours of sleep.

Teaching tip: Young people may not have enough time to get the sleep they need, but that does not absolve them of their sleep responsibilities. Discuss the importance of sleeping well in class - try talking about common sleep mistakes and tips for getting a good night's rest.

Teenagers can find it hard to read emotions

Research carried out by Dr Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and others suggests that because the pre-frontal cortex is still developing, teenagers rely more on their limbic system (which acts more like an instinctive reaction) when reading emotions.

In a test, adults were shown a picture of a person's face and had to choose whether the emotion expressed was fear, shock or anger. All the adults correctly identified the look of fear, whereas only about half of teenagers got the right answer. One possible reason for this disparity is that a teenager's limbic system is less accurate than an adult's pre-frontal cortex. The limbic system also elicits an increased emotional response, so teenagers are more likely to misread an emotion and overact while doing so.

Teaching tip: There is no quick solution - time and patience are required. Be explicit and clear about what you mean and help students improve their self-awareness. This is a helpful factsheet about pupils' meta-cognitive skills (the ability to analyse how you think). In class, you could get pupils to ask themselves these nine simple questions to help them on the road to self-awareness.

Teenagers have less self-control

When working with teenagers, it can often feels as if they have no self-control whatsoever - if they think it, they say it (or do it). Research suggests that this reduced self-control is most pronounced in heated situations (which is exactly when you need it).

This is not only down to the developing pre-frontal cortex (which is associated with impulse control), but also due to enhanced activity in the part of the brain that seeks out novelty and reward.

Teaching tip: Self-control can be improved but it is difficult. One option is to limit distractions during times when concentration and memory are needed and when tensions are running high, for example, during revision periods. Talk to your students about what distracts them (it is good idea to make students put their mobile phones away) and try to reduce these factors as much as you realistically can.

A final thought...

Being a teenager is hard. You face life-altering exams at a time when your brain is going through huge changes. While they have a responsibility to manage their own behaviour, by understanding the changes and challenges they face, teachers can guide their practice to help them navigate this as happily and successfully as possible.

Bradley Busch is a registered psychologist and director at InnerDrive. Follow @Inner_Drive on Twitter.

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Secrets of the teenage brain: a psychologist's guide for teachers

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If being a teenager is hard, teaching them is harder. Here are four insights into the adolescent brain - and how it can inform classroom practice

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Executive functioning (EF) is a burgeoning research area for psychologists, neuroscientists, and educators. For some, EF might seem like the cognitive science flavor of the week. But for others, its study is uncovering a significant piece of the puzzle for how we learn, feel, and act. And those latter folks have a lot to show for it.

In fact, the mainstream interest in EF that has developed over the last two decades may be best summarized by typing "executive functioning" into the search bar on Amazon.com. Here you'll find a wealth of books illustrating scattered, messy, and forgetful youth. In these works, authors offer parents and educators a pathway to better understand those children that forget their homework, fidget through class, and get lost in thought when they're supposed to be finishing chores.

Yet while the disorganized adolescent is certainly one component of executive functions in action (or inaction), it merely scratches the surface of what research is uncovering. And with business booming in the EF world, so to speak, it is now more important than ever to take a step back and examine some of the ways that EF research is being applied in classrooms and households.
What is EF?
Executive functioning is an umbrella term that includes the cognitive processes of attention, self-regulation, mental flexibility (the ability to transition from or between one thought or action to another), and working memory [1].

We use EF when we do mental math to calculate a waiter's tip; when we remember to raise our hand instead of blurting out an answer; when we attend to a science lecture; and when we describe the same event from the varying perspectives of multiple people.

Studies continue to uncover just how entrenched these processes are throughout the lifespan. EF is linked to several positive developmental outcomes, such as school readiness in early childhood [2] and the development of both crystallized and fluid intelligence in middle childhood [3].

Weak EF skills, on the other hand, go far beyond a messy backpack. Low EF has been found to predict difficulties with mathematics [4], externalizing problem behaviors in middle childhood [5], and harsh parenting in adulthood [6]. Challenges with EF also appear to play a role in a number of developmental disorders, such as ADHD and Autism [7].

Imaging studies show that the frontal lobe of the brain is the EF powerhouse, with the most rapid development of these skills occurring in early childhood [8]. While all children are born with the capacity to develop their EF, actual skill growth requires some degree of explicit practice and modeling. For this reason, much of the mainstream EF literature is geared toward K-8 parents and educators. The Harvard Center on the Developing Child, for example, offers a variety of strategies to support children's EF growth. Picture sorting games for toddlers, memory games like Simon Says for kindergarteners, and fantasy role-play throughout elementary school serve this purpose.

Next Step: Step Back

There is little doubt that executive function skills exist or that they provide an important cognitive foundation for development. But a critical lens is essential when we begin to take empirical EF knowledge and apply it to youth.

In particular, let us tread lightly when we make a qualitative assumption about a child's skill level, or how to improve it.

How can we be mindful of this caveat in daily practice? A good start is to question the tendency for EF skills to be dichotomized as high or low, good or bad. Of course, some children have different EF skills than others. But the growing instinct to take the attentive, obedient child and the fidgety, distracted child and fit them into either side of this dichotomy risks overlooking important individual contexts.

Imagine middle school student Joe. Joe lives in a high-crime neighborhood but attends a high-resource school in the next town over. As a result of his home environment, Joe has learned to self-regulate in ways that heighten his vigilance and attention to seemingly unimportant details. He is hyper aware of sights and sounds in the distance that, at home, imply an approaching stranger. In his classroom, however, Joe's attention and self-regulation skills are less fitting, as the distant sound he is attending to instead of his math lesson is simply another student walking the hallway. Compared to his peers, who do not navigate such contrasting environments each day, Joe's EF skill level concerns his teacher.

In this scenario, Joe is functional at home (high EF) yet distractible and inattentive at school (low EF). And if we can only fit Joe into the dichotomy of high or low EF, instead of on a fluid spectrum, his low-EF presentation at school is likely to make that call.

The factors that engender the presentation of high or low EF skills is an important distinction to make. Here, Joe's distraction is different from his classmate Jane's, which is a result of her ADHD. Accordingly, the support system that each needs is also different.

A crucial step toward accurately qualitatively assessing children's EF, especially in schools, is therefore to attend to the interactions between the person and the world within which a child is situated. Before we call in the specialist, before we assign remediation, before we purchase the neurotraining software, let's ask such questions as what are the social rules, values, and stressors that this child is navigating among?

Because for some children, a workbook of puzzles and concentration exercises ordered from Amazon may be enormously helpful. But for others, a consideration of context, resources, and resiliency is the better route.

1. Best, J.R. & Miller, P.H. (2010). A developmental perspective on executive function. Child Development, 81(6), 1641-1660.
2. Blair, C. & Razza, R.P. (2007). Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Child Development, 78(2), 647-663.
3. Brydges, C.R., Reid, C.L., Fox, A.M. & Anderson, M. (2012). A unitary executive function predicts intelligence in children. Intelligence, 40(5), 458-469
4. Toll, S.W.M, Van der Ven, S.H.G, Kroesbergen, E.H. & Van Luit, J.E.H. (2011). Executive functions as predictors of math learning disabilities. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 44(6), 521-532.
5. Woltering, S., Lishak, V., Hodgson, N., Granic, I. & Zelazo, P.D. (2016). Executive function in children with externalizing and comorbid internalizing behavior problems. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 57(1), 30-38.
6. Deater-Deckard, K., Wang, Z., Chen, N. & Ann Bell, M. (2012). Maternal executive function, harsh parenting, and child conduct problems. The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 53(10), 1084-1091.
7. Craig, F., Margari, F., Legrottaglie, A.R., Palumbi, R., de Giambattista, C. & Margari, L. (2016). A review of executive function deficits in autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment,12, 1191-1202.
8. Brydges, C.R., Reid, C.L., Fox, A.M. & Anderson, M. (2012). A unitary executive function predicts intelligence in children. Intelligence, 40(5), 458-469.

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Executive Function: More Than Meets the Eye

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Executive functioning (EF) is a burgeoning research area for psychologists, neuroscientists, and educators. For some, EF might seem like the cognitive science flavor of the week. But for others, its study is uncovering a significant piece of the puzzle for how we learn, feel, and act.

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Dr. Tokuhama Jan. 2018

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Harvard Article

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Adapted from Stress Management: Approaches for preventing and reducing stress.

Proper breathing goes by many names. You may have heard it called diaphragmatic breathing, abdominal breathing, or belly breathing. When you breathe deeply, the air coming in through your nose fully fills your lungs, and you will notice that your lower belly rises. The ability to breathe so deeply and powerfully is not limited to a select few. This skill is inborn but often lies dormant. Reawakening it allows you to tap one of your body's strongest self-healing mechanisms.

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Adapted from Stress Management: Approaches for preventing and reducing stress . Proper breathing goes by many names. You may have heard it called diaphragmatic breathing, abdominal breathing, or belly breathing. When you breathe deeply, the air coming in through your nose fully fills your lungs, and you will notice that your lower belly rises.

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Articles on Learning Styles Myth Support

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Articles on Learning Styles Myth Support

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Compiled in Google Drive

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THE GUARDIAN News Article. March 2017

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Teaching children according to their individual "learning style" does not achieve better results and should be ditched by schools in favour of evidence-based practice, according to leading scientists.

Thirty eminent academics from the worlds of neuroscience, education and psychology have signed a letter to the Guardian voicing their concern about the popularity of the learning style approach among some teachers.

They say it is ineffective, a waste of resources and potentially even damaging as it can lead to a fixed approach that could impair pupils' potential to apply or adapt themselves to different ways of learning.

The group opposes the theory that learning is more effective if pupils are taught using an individual approach identified as their personal "learning style". Some pupils, for example, are identified as having a "listening" style and could therefore be taught with storytelling and discussion rather than written exercises.

The letter describes that approach as "one of a number of common neuromyths that do nothing to enhance education". It is signed by Steven Pinker, Johnstone family professor of psychology at Harvard University; Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford; and leading neuroscientist Prof Uta Frith of University College London among others.

School leaders say the enthusiasm for learning styles in schools has faded, but research in 2012 among teachers in the UK and Netherlands found that 80% believed individuals learned better when they received information in their preferred learning style. In 2013, research by the Wellcome Trust found that 76% of teachers had used learning styles in their teaching.

As part of international Brain Awareness Week, which starts on Monday, scientists want to raise awareness of these commonly held beliefs about how to improve learning, which are supposedly based on research but not backed up with scientific evidence.

As part of the campaign, an organisation called Speakezee is sending neuroscientists into schools to raise awareness among teachers and pupils of the latest research based on established scientific findings, and to flag up the shortcomings of the learning style approach.

"Teachers need to be armed with up-to-date evidence of what has been shown to be effective so that schools are not wasting time or money on unsubstantiated practices that do not help students," the letter says. "It is hard to establish the cost to the education system of using learning styles. Some schools have it as part of their teaching ethos whereas others bring in external consultants or send teachers on training courses.

"Aside from the cost in terms of time and money, one concern is that learning styles leads to belief that individual students are unable to learn because the material is inappropriate."
Four neuromyths that are still prevalent in schools - debunked
It continues: "The brain is essential for learning, but learning styles is just one of a number of common neuromyths that do nothing to enhance education."

The letter, organised by Prof Bruce Hood, chair of developmental psychology in society at the University of Bristol, says most people believe they have a preferred learning style - either visual, auditory or kinesthetic - and teaching using a variety of these styles can be engaging.

"However the claim that students will perform better when the teaching is matched to their preferred sensory modality (learning style) is simply not supported by the science and of questionable value," he said.

According to Hood, a recent poll of more than 100 head teachers of independent schools found over 85% believed in learning styles, and 66% used them in their schools with many sending teachers on courses and 6% paying for external consultants. Amounts spent ranged from nothing to over £30,000 per year, he said.

Geoff Barton, headteacher of King Edward VI school in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, who is soon to take over as general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said he hoped the age of neuromyths was over.

"I think the fad about learning styles faded long ago, and I would be surprised if many schools continued to subscribe to the approach. That said, the notion of making teaching and learning more varied in classrooms is helpful and likely to motivate a wider range of students," he said.
The making of an education catastrophe - schools in Knowsley were dubbed 'wacky warehouses'
"Modern neuroscience - rather than some quick-fix version of it - should help teachers and students to develop real learning, real progress and real success."

The Educational Endowment Foundation, an independent grant-making charity, has also documented its concerns about a learning styles approach.

It said: "There is very limited evidence for any consistent set of learning 'styles' that can be used reliably to identify genuine differences in the learning needs of young people, and evidence suggests that it is unhelpful to assign learners to groups or categories on the basis of a supposed learning style."

The Department for Education declined to provide a formal comment on learning styles, but a spokeswoman said it was up to teachers to decide what they wanted to use in their classrooms.
Topics

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Teachers must ditch 'neuromyth' of learning styles, say scientists

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Teaching children according to their individual "learning style" does not achieve better results and should be ditched by schools in favour of evidence-based practice, according to leading scientists. Thirty eminent academics from the worlds of neuroscience, education and psychology have signed a letter to the Guardian voicing their concern about the popularity of the learning style approach among some teachers.

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The New Science of Learning: Effective Approaches for Older Students with Autism and Attention Disorders

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The New Science of Learning: Effective Approaches for Older Students with Autism and Attention Disorders - PresenceLearning

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HOME - online link

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Tools of the Mind gives teachers the tools to ensure every child becomes a successful learner, developing the underlying cognitive, social and emotional skills needed to reach his or her highest potential. "Tools is both developmentally appropriate and appropriately challenging." Supervisor of EC Special Education, Lexington Public Schools, MA Learn to play, play to learn to improve outcomes!

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Self-Regulation Skills: Why They Are Fundamental

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ADHD and Executive Function - Dr. Russell Barkley

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Summary

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Birdville ISD: Making Thinking Visible in 2013-14

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Uploaded by Crysten Caviness on 2013-08-19.

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Thinking routines

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example in classroom

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Author and teacher Mark Church demonstrated the "headlines" technique in the classroom

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Visible Thinking

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example

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what are executive funcitons

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Adele Diamond: What are Executive Functions?

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Dr. Tracey-Tokuhama

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Conexiones: Plataforma de Ciencias del Aprendizaje

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Website- digital alterantive

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Time Well Spent is a movement to transform the race for attention so it aligns with our best interests.

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Podcast

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The Secret to Making Video Games Good for You

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This week, how video games can help you become smarter, happier, and more creative-- if you use them right.

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Carol Ann Tomlinson and

M. Layne Kalbfleisch

Three principles from brain research—emotional safety, appropriate challenge, and self-constructed meaning—suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to classroom teaching is ineffective for most students and harmful to some.

A few years ago, I eagerly signed up for a one-day computer class on using a particular graphics and layout program. I was highly motivated: I had an immediate need to know the content, was excited about becoming more competent with computers, and had invested heavily in the success of the day through paying a hefty tuition and making a long, early-morning drive in heavy traffic.

The instructor knew his stuff. I know that because he talked nonstop throughout the day and never seemed (as far as I could tell) to repeat himself. As we sat at computers, he told us step-by-step what to do. He had hooked up a computer to a projector so he could also show us, but he either forgot to do so or felt it unnecessary to demonstrate the obvious.

I missed the third instruction he gave us (probably 10 minutes into the morning) because I was still struggling to do the second step correctly. After that, my confusion escalated, and I alternated between desperation and thoughts of homicide for the rest of the morning.

I developed two coping strategies—trying to disguise my inability to make anything relevant happen on my computer screen and devising a way to develop at least a few modest competencies before the end of the day. My strategy to disguise my incompetence was to look at the man seated next to me and copy what he did. Unfortunately, he probably knew nearly as much as the instructor did and was using the morning to complete a layout of his own. He did have some questions that evidently weren't on the agenda, so he used a trial-and-error approach to solve his own problems.

I planned to remediate my incompetence by photo copying the student manual during the midday break so that I could study it at my own pace at home. I couldn't make sense of the manual's many and complex ideas while the instructor jetted along and while I was trying to do something on the computer screen. That strategy also failed when the instructor locked all the student manuals in a closet until we returned from lunch.

At times during the day, I was angry at the teacher for not adjusting his instruction to fit my needs. (So, I assume, was the man seated next to me. He didn't return after lunch.) At other times, I despaired of ever mastering the computer. By the end of the day, I was exhausted.

I have never taken another computer workshop.

The computer workshop was a prime example of a one-size-fits-all classroom. Although the teacher was well meaning and knowledgeable, he had so much curriculum to cover, and so little time, that he saw no alternative to telling his students what he knew and assuming they would get it.

I know that the teacher lost a struggling learner who was highly motivated but who needed more repetitions of fewer ideas, more individual guidance, a clearer sense of why things work like they do in the software program, more time for hands-on problem solving, and more monitoring by the teacher. I feel fairly sure that he lost an advanced learner who needed less up-front information, an opportunity to ask his own questions, and a chance to use the skills he already had and to develop new ones through a relevant application.

Regrettably, most of our classrooms are too much like the computer workshop. Driven by a sense that they have too much to cover in too little time, teachers enter a classroom with a single lesson that they deliver to learners at a single pace and through a single instructional approach. As teachers, we make few, if any, modifications for struggling learners (Bateman, 1993) or advanced learners (Westberg, Archambault, Dobyns, & Salvin, 1993). We often disregard students interests and learning profiles (Gardner, 1994). We do one thing in one way and hope for the best but for many of our students, it will not be good enough.

James Nehring laments,

We assume in this country that all kids are the same. Of course no educated adult would ever say that, but the assumption is clearly there. It is embedded in our school system....We force all kids through the same mold. If there is one thing on which both research and common sense agree, it is that kids are not the same, that they learn in different ways, that they respond to different kinds of incentives. (Nehring, 1992, p. 156)

Why Attend to Individual Differences?

Nehring is correct that our common sense tells us that not all kindergartners are alike, that 4 th graders vary, that middle schoolers are all over the place in how they learn, and that high schoolers bring into the classroom a span of readiness as broad as the number of years they have spent in school. He is also correct that if common sense isn't enough, research clearly tells us to attend to the individual when we teach. Recently, the amassed understandings about how the brain works have added to our considerable research base on the importance of developing and delivering the curriculum and instruction that are responsive to individual learning needs.

Brain research suggest three broad and interrelated principles that point clearly to the need for differentiated classrooms, that is, classrooms responsive to students' varying readiness levels, varying interests, and varying learning profiles.

What causes a child to feel unsafe or ill at ease in a classroom? A child who needs an accepting and relatively open learning environment but whose teacher runs a tight ship will feel intimidated. A student who asks probing questions only to see peers roll their eyes (and perhaps even the teacher as well) will feel rejected. A student whose first language is not spoken in the classroom, and who is largely left to his or her own devices to figure out what is going on, will feel mute and out of place. A child who simultaneously feels pressure from the teacher to excel and pressure from peers to reject the trappings of school will feel unsafe.

These responses are not willful, not imaginary. They are appropriate responses by a child to chemically induced changes in the brain signaling that the first order of business is self preservation—not learning. Even as an adult in the computer workshop, I felt so inadequate, so afraid of displaying incompetence, that I spent more time trying to figure out how to cope than how to learn.

In the computer workshop, I had the former experience. The man who disappeared after lunch had the latter. Optimal learning takes place when the brain of a moderately challenged student produces an amount of neurotransmitters that facilitates rather than impedes learning (Howard, 1994; Jensen, 1998; White & Milner, 1992). The trouble with a one-size-fits-all classroom is that the lesson is pitched at a single challenge level, virtually ensuring that many students will be overchallenged or underchallenged and, therefore, will not learn.

The difficulty for teachers is that classrooms today are filled with students of diverse backgrounds, interests, and experiences. These students take in information through different channels, process ideas at different rates, and have varied preferences for modes of expression. What enables academically diverse students to make sense of essential understandings and skills? Brain research suggests at least two guidelines.

First, teaching that is based on concepts and the principles that govern them, in contrast with teaching that is rooted solely or largely in facts, is essential. Concept-based teaching increases the likelihood that each learner can construct and enhance frameworks of meaning, see the relationship between the parts and the whole of what is being studied, relate the subject being studied to his or her own life and to other topics (Kesner, Bolland, & Dakis, 1993), use the ideas more readily (Keverne, Nevison, & Martel, 1997), and retrieve and remember ideas and information better (Erickson, 1998).

Further, launching curriculum from key concepts and principles ensures that struggling learners focus on what is most important and powerful in the curriculum. It invites advanced learners to extend their understanding in a way that is meaning-rich instead of either repeating the known or engaging in often tangential or trivial enrichment.

Second, the brain learns best when it "does," rather than when it "absorbs" (Pally, 1997). Thus, all students must think at a high level to solve knotty problems and to transform the ideas and information they encounter.

What Does a Differentiated Classroom Look Like?

The three interdependent principles from brain research help us sketch what a differentiated classroom might look like. Certainly, these principles can be translated in various ways appropriate to the developmental levels of students, the needs of teachers, and the nature of subjects. Nonetheless, some characteristics of academically responsive, or differentiated, classrooms derive from what we know about the brain.

Students and teachers continually work to accept and appreciate one another's similarities and differences—to be respectful of one another.

Teachers are hunters and gatherers who energetically continue to find out all they can about students' current readiness, interests, and learning profiles.

Teachers use what they learn about students to provide varied learning options and build learning experiences around the important concepts of the content.

All students take part in respectful learning experiences that are equally interesting, equally important, and equally powerful.

Students use essential skills to address open-ended problems designed to help them makes sense of key concepts and principles.

Teachers often present several learning options at different degrees of difficulty to ensure appropriate challenge for students at varied readiness levels.

Teachers often give students choices about topics of study, ways of learning, modes of expression, and working conditions.

Teachers present information in varied ways, for example, orally, visually, though demonstration, part to whole, and whole to part. Instructional approaches invite attention to individual needs, for example, learning contracts, graduated rubrics, complex instruction, entry points, and problem-based learning.

Students who work as collaborators with classmates and teacher—to make sure everyone grows.

Teachers serve as coaches who attend to individuals as well as to the whole class. The goals of teachers are to meet all students at their starting points and to move each one along a continuum of growth as far and as quickly as possible. Learning has no ceiling.

Teachers may assign students to groups on a random basis or on the basis of similar readiness, mixed readiness, similar interests, mixed interests, similar learning profile, or mixed learning profile, or mixed learning profile. Sometimes teachers constitute the groups on the basis of an assessed perception of need; sometimes students themselves select the groups.

Teachers design homework to extend the individual's understanding and skill level.

Varied assessment options are common, for example, portfolios, authentic problems to solve, oral presentations, and tests.

Grades—or reports to parents, whatever form they take—are based, at least in large measure, on individual growth.

In classrooms where teachers work consistently to develop these hallmarks, students of varying backgrounds, experiences, interests, readiness levels, and learning profiles are highly likely to feel emotionally safe, experience appropriate challenge, and make sense of powerful ideas. In these brain-friendly classrooms, teachers build on our burgeoning awareness that teach me well, you must teach my brain.

References

Bateman, B. (1993). Learning disabilities: The changing landscape. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 25(1), 29-63.

Erickson, L. (1998). Concept-based curriculum and instruction: Teaching beyond the facts. Corwin.

Gardner, H. (1994). Reflections on multiple intelligences: Myths and messages. Phi Delta Kappan, 78(5), 200-207.

Howard, P. (1994). The owner's manual for the brain. Austin, TX: Leornian.

Jensen, E. (1998). Teaching with the brain in mind. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Kesner, R.P., Bolland, B.L., & Dakis, M. (1993). Memory for spatial locations, motor responses, and objects: Triple dissociation among hippocampus, caudate nucleus, and extrastriate visual cortex. Experimental Brain Research, 93, 462-470.

Keverne, E.B., Nevison, C.M., & Martel, F.L. (1997). Early learning and the social bond. In C.S. Carter, I.I. Lederhendler, & B. Kirkpatrick (Eds.), The integrative neurobiology of affiliation. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 807 (pp. 329-339). New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

Koob, G.F., Cole, B.J., Swerdlow, N.R., & leMoal, M. (1990). Stress, performance, and arousal: Focus on CRF. (National Institute on Drug Abuse Research Monograph No. 97-163176). LaJolla, CA: Research Institute of Scripps Clinic, Department of Neuropharmacology.

McGaugh, J.L., Introini-Collison, I.B., Cahill, L.F., Castellano, C., Dalmaz, C., Parent, M.B., & Williams, C.L. (1993). Neuromodulatory systems and memory storage: Role of the amygdala. Behavioral Brain Research, 58, 81-90.

Nehring, J. (1992). The schools we have: The schools we want. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pally, R. (1997). How brain development is shaped by genetic and environmental factors. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78, 587-593.

Shultz, W., Dayan, P., & Montague, P.R. (1997). A neural substrate of prediction and reward. Science, 275, 1593-1599.

Westberg, K., Archambault, F., Dobyns, S., & Salvin, T. (1993). The classroom practices observational study. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 16, 120-146.

White, N.M., & Milner, P.M. (1992). The psychobiology of reinforcers. Annual Review of Psychology, 43, 443-471.

Carol Ann Tomlinson is an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia.

M. Layne Kalbfleisch is an Educational Psychology doctoral student conducting neurological research at the University of Virginia. The authors may be reached in care of Carol Ann Tomlinson, Room 179 Ruffner Hall, 405 Emmet St., Charlottesville, VA 22903 (e-mail: cat3yvirginia.edu).

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Teach Me Teach My Brain: Diff. Classroom

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Three principles from brain research-emotional safety, appropriate challenge, and self-constructed meaning-suggest that a one-size-fits-all approach to classroom teaching is ineffective for most students and harmful to some. A few years ago, I eagerly signed up for a one-day computer class on using a particular graphics and layout program.

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https://youtu.be/eoVP4exNOis

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Este documental de la TV francesa, muestra como en 4 lugares diferentes del mundo los niños y niñas viven diversas experiencias para asistir a sus escuelas y . Versión resumida del corto documental Camino a la Escuela. Dirigida por Humberto Saco.

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Edutopia- Integrating 16 Habits of the Mind

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Edutopia- Integrating 16 Habits of the Mind

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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ASCD empowers educators to achieve excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

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Interactive Notebook

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Try it!

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Neuroscientist

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"To some appreciable degree, these brain differences have to translate to behavioral differences," says Cahill. Numerous studies show that they do, sometimes with medically meaningful implications.

A 2017 study in JAMA Psychiatry imaged the brains of 98 individuals ages 8 to 22 with autism spectrum disorder and 98 control subjects. Both groups contained roughly equal numbers of male and female subjects. The study confirmed earlier research showing that the pattern of variation in the thickness of the brain's cortex differed between males and females. But the great majority of female subjects with ASD, the researchers found, had cortical-thickness variation profiles similar to those of typical non-ASD males.

In other words, having a typical male brain structure, whether you're a boy or a girl, is a substantial risk factor for ASD. By definition, more boys' than girls' brains have this profile, possibly helping explain ASD's four- to fivefold preponderance among boys compared with girls.

Why our brains differ

But why are men's and women's brains different? One big reason is that, for much of their lifetimes, women and men have different fuel additives running through their tanks: the sex-steroid hormones. In female mammals, the primary additives are a few members of the set of molecules called estrogens, along with another molecule called progesterone; and in males, testosterone and a few look-alikes collectively deemed androgens. Importantly, males developing normally in utero get hit with a big mid-gestation surge of testosterone, permanently shaping not only their body parts and proportions but also their brains. (Genetic defects disrupting testosterone's influence on a developing male human's cells induce a shift to a feminine body plan, our "default" condition.)

In general, brain regions that differ in size between men and women (such as the amygdala and the hippocampus) tend to contain especially high concentrations of receptors for sex hormones.

Another key variable in the composition of men versus women stems from the sex chromosomes, which form one of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes in each cell. Generally, females have two X chromosomes in their pair, while males have one X and one Y chromosome. A gene on the Y chromosome is responsible for the cascade of developmental events that cause bodies and brains to take on male characteristics. Some other genes on the Y chromosome may be involved in brain physiology and cognition.

Scientists routinely acknowledge that the presence or absence of a single DNA base pair can make a medically important difference. What about an entire chromosome? While the genes hosted on the X chromosome and the Y chromosome (about 1,500 on the X, 27 on the Y) may once have had counterparts on the other, that's now the case for only a few of them. Every cell in a man's body (including his brain) has a slightly different set of functioning ​sex-​chromosome genes from those operating in a woman's.

Sex-based differences in brain structure and physiology reflect the alchemy of these hormone/receptor interactions, their effects within the cells, and the intermediating influence of genetic variables - particularly the possession of an XX versus an XY genotype, says Cahill.

Zeroing in on neural circuits

Shah's experiments in animals employ technologies enabling scientists to boost or suppress the activity of individual nerve cells - or even of single genes within those nerve cells - in a conscious, active animal's brain. These experiments have pinpointed genes whose activity levels differ strongly at specific sites in male versus female mice's brains.

What would happen, Shah's team wondered, if you knocked out of commission one or another of these genes whose activity level differed between male and female brains? They tried it with one of their candidate genes, turning off one that was normally more active in females.

Doing this, they found, totally shredded mouse moms' willingness to defend their nests from intruders and to retrieve pups who had wandered away - maternal mandates that normal female mice unfailingly observe - yet had no observable effect on their sexual behavior. Torpedoing a different gene radically reduced a female mouse's mating mood, but males in which the gene has been trashed appear completely normal.

All this points to a picture of at least parts of the brain as consisting of modules. Each module consists of a neural or genetic pathway in charge of one piece of a complicated behavior, and responds to genetic and hormonal signals. These modules - or at least some of them - are masculinized or feminized, respectively, by the early testosterone rush or its absence. The mammalian brain features myriad modules of this sort, giving rise to complex combinations of behavioral traits.

Which is not to say every man's or woman's brain looks the same. Our multitudinous genetic variations interact with some of our genes' differential responsiveness to estrogens versus androgens. This complicated pinball game affects goings-on in at least some of the brain's neural circuits and in whatever little piece of behavior each of these neural circuits manages.

"We think gender-specific behavior is a composite of all these modules, which, added up, give you your overall degree of maleness and femaleness," says Shah.

Consider the genes Shah has isolated whose activity levels differ significantly in the brains of male and female mice. "Almost all of these genes have human analogues," he says. "We still don't completely understand their function in human social behavior. But when we looked at publicly available databases to find out what we do know about them, we found a surprising number that in humans have been linked with autism, alcoholism and other conditions."

Bigger imaging studies and imaginative animal research now in the works promise to reveal much more about humanity's inherent - although by no means uniform, and often not substantial - sex-associated cognitive differences and vulnerability to diseases.

Trying to assign exact percentages to the relative contributions of "culture" versus "biology" to the behavior of free-living human individuals in a complex social environment is tough at best. Halpern offers a succinct assessment: "The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero."

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How men's and women's brains are different

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"To some appreciable degree, these brain differences have to translate to behavioral differences," says Cahill. Numerous studies show that they do, sometimes with medically meaningful implications. A 2017 study in JAMA Psychiatry imaged the brains of 98 individuals ages 8 to 22 with autism spectrum disorder and 98 control subjects.

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Article: Difference in male and female brains?

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Article: Difference in male and female brains?

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Image Source/Alamy Stock Photo

Do the anatomical differences between men and women-sex organs, facial hair, and the like-extend to our brains? The question has been as difficult to answer as it has been controversial. Now, the largest brain-imaging study of its kind indeed finds some sex-specific patterns, but overall more similarities than differences. The work raises new questions about how brain differences between the sexes may influence intelligence and behavior.

For decades, brain scientists have noticed that on average, male brains tend to have slightly higher total brain volume than female ones, even when corrected for males' larger average body size. But it has proved notoriously tricky to pin down exactly which substructures within the brain are more or less voluminous. Most studies have looked at relatively small sample sizes-typically fewer than 100 brains-making large-scale conclusions impossible.

In the new study, a team of researchers led by psychologist Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, turned to data from UK Biobank, an ongoing, long-term biomedical study of people living in the United Kingdom with 500,000 enrollees. A subset of those enrolled in the study underwent brain scans using MRI. In 2750 women and 2466 men aged 44-77, Ritchie and his colleagues examined the volumes of 68 regions within the brain, as well as the thickness of the cerebral cortex, the brain's wrinkly outer layer thought to be important in consciousness, language, memory, perception, and other functions.

Adjusting for age, on average, they found that women tended to have significantly thicker cortices than men. Thicker cortices have been associated with higher scores on a variety of cognitive and general intelligence tests. Meanwhile, men had higher brain volumes than women in every subcortical region they looked at, including the hippocampus (which plays broad roles in memory and spatial awareness), the amygdala (emotions, memory, and decision-making), striatum (learning, inhibition, and reward-processing), and thalamus (processing and relaying sensory information to other parts of the brain).

When the researchers adjusted the numbers to look at the subcortical regions relative to overall brain size, the comparisons became much closer: There were only 14 regions where men had higher brain volume and 10 regions where women did.

Volumes and cortical thickness between men also tended to vary much more than they did between women, the researchers report this month in a paper posted to the bioRxiv server, which makes articles available before they have been peer reviewed.

That's intriguing because it lines up with previous work looking at sex and IQ tests. "[That previous study] finds no average difference in intelligence, but males were more variable than females," Ritchie says. "This is why our finding that male participants' brains were, in most measures, more variable than female participants' brains is so interesting. It fits with a lot of other evidence that seems to point toward males being more variable physically and mentally."

Despite the study's consistent sex-linked patterns, the researchers also found considerable overlap between men and women in brain volume and cortical thickness, just as you might find in height. In other words, just by looking at the brain scan, or height, of someone plucked at random from the study, researchers would be hard pressed to say whether it came from a man or woman. That suggests both sexes' brains are far more similar than they are different.

The study didn't account for whether participants' gender matched their biological designation as male or female.

The study's sheer size makes the results convincing, writes Amber Ruigrok, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom who has studied sex differences in the brain, in an email to Science. "Larger overall volumes in males and higher cortical thickness in females fits with findings from previous research. But since previous research mostly used relatively small sample sizes, this study confirms these predictions."

Ruigrok notes one factor that should be addressed in future studies: menopause. Many of the women in the study were in the age range of the stages of menopause, and hormonal fluctuations have been shown to influence brain structures. That may have played some role in the sex differences noted in the study, she says.

The controversial-and still unsettled-question is whether these patterns mean anything to intelligence or behavior. Though popular culture is replete with supposed examples of intellectual and behavioral differences between the sexes, only a few, like higher physical aggression in men, have been borne out by scientific research.

For the moment, Ritchie says his work isn't equipped to answer such heady questions: He is focused on accurately describing the differences in the male and female brain, not speculating on what they could mean.

doi:10.1126/science.aal1025

Michael Price is a former scientific employment and training writer at Science Careers.

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ADHD is the term we use when the Front Brain has a LOW power supply of brain chemicals.

The Front Brain is the organizing center of the brain. It orchestrates everything...from your five senses and emotions to the thoughts you generate in response to them.

For example, imagine this string of lights represents the neuron wire connections in your brain. The first bulb would be your Front Brain.

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This process is 440% more efficient.

The SOAR Learning & Soft Skills System for organizing papers, was developed precisely to accomplish this efficiency.

ADHD brains do best with fewer steps. This is the ADHD Circuit.

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