Reading Strategies for Students with ADHD

When it comes to teaching students diagnosed with ADHD there are many challenges that you face. It is important to employ strategies that are beneficial for these students but also for your entire class. Below are 5 research-based strategies that fill this need in the classroom.

Think-A-Loud

Overview: This strategy is defined as speaking aloud about the reading strategies that are being used (Jackson, 2016). This is shown to improve reading comprehension among students with ADHD (Johnson et al., 2012).

How to Implement: The teacher will model this strategy for students during a whole class read-aloud. The students will sit around the teacher. While reading, the teacher will stop at predetermined parts of the story to model how they think about the texts. The teacher will encourage students to share what they are thinking while the teacher is reading. After the teacher modeling, the students will be tasked to complete this on their own with a picture book of their choice.

Story Mapping

Overview: This strategy is defined as a graphic organization tool that allows users to lay out a story based on different sections (Chavez et al., 2015). Chavez et al. showed that when used with students with ADHD, students were more likely to improve their scores on their weekly reading assessments (2015). Story maps can show different levels of organization based on the difficulty of the book or grade level (Chavez et al., 2015).

How to Implement: The teacher will introduce the concept of story mapping to students. This strategy can be beneficial for all students not just those with ADHD. The teacher will model how to fill out the story map as they read a simple picture book to the students. Students will fill out the story map with the teacher. After the introduction, students will begin to use the story map in small groups as they read their weekly stories.

Read-Ask-Put (RAP)

Overview: In this paraphrasing strategy students are asked to read a paragraph, ask themselves what the main idea and two details are, and then put the main idea into their own words (Kemp, 2017). When used with students with ADHD, students are more likely to increase their inferential comprehension skills (Kemp, 2017).

How to Implement: The teacher will introduce the students to the concept of RAP by defining all of the steps. Then the teacher will model the strategy for the students by using the think-aloud model to show the steps. Using the gradual release model, students will practice using RAP on small grade-level based reading passages. By the end of the introduction of RAP, students will be asked to complete the three steps individually on their reading passages.

Activating Prior Knowledge

Overview: In this strategy, teachers asked students to recall information that they may know about a topic before beginning a reading of a text, this allows students to have a basis upon which to build new information (Kostons & van der Werf, 2015). When teachers activate a student’s prior knowledge before reading a text, all students are shown to have higher comprehension of their reading (Kostons & van der Werf, 2015).

How to Implement: For this strategy, before reading a text, the teacher will identify information that would be beneficial for students to know before reading the story. The teacher will ask students to share what they recall about a topic. This will be shared verbally and recorded for students to reference during and after the reading. This strategy can be used before reading any text.

I hope that you take these strategies and work to implement them in your classroom!

References:

Chavez, J. N., Martinez, J., & Pienta, R. S. (2015). Effects of story mapping on third-grade students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Journal of Pedagogy / Pedagogický Casopis, 6(1), 95–121. https://doi.org/10.1515/jped-2015-0006

Jackson, V. (2016). Applying the think-aloud strategy to improve reading comprehension of science content. Current Issues in Education, 19(2).

Johnson, J. W., Reid, R., & Mason, L. H. (2012). Improving the reading recall of high school students with ADHD. Remedial and Special Education, 33(4), 258-268.

Kemp, S. E. (2017). RAP: A reading comprehension strategy for students with learning disabilities and concomitant speech-language impairments or ADHD.

Kostons, D., & van der Werf, G. (2015). The effects of activating prior topic and metacognitive knowledge on text comprehension scores. The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 85(3), 264–275. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12069

Mckee, S. (2012). Reading comprehension, what we know: A review of research 1995 to 2011. Language Testing in Asia, 2(1), 45.

Swanson, E., Vaughn, S., & Wexler, J. (2017). Enhancing adolescents’ comprehension of text by building vocabulary knowledge. Grantee Submission, 50(2), 84–94.

Thapar, A., & Stergiakouli, E. (2008). An Overview on the Genetics of ADHD. Xin li xue bao. Acta psychologica Sinica, 40(10), 1088.