Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Among Middle School Students in South Texas - Free Essay Example

In this article done by Dr. Fred Guerra and Dr. Michelle Brown Teacher Knowledge of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Among Middle School Students in South Texas this study was conducted to examine exactly how much knowledge do teachers in South Texas middle schools have with students who present with ADHD. In specific they wanted to know three areas; overall knowledge of ADHD, the recognizing symptoms of ADHD and the knowledge of treatments available for ADHD. The way that they were able to measure this was with the study instrument KADDS scale. The population in this study was originally supposed to be 341 but they did not all participate so when the study began it was 107 middle school teachers in five different middle schools in three different districts. The data was collected within one year (2008-2009). This was a quantitative study. The methods and procedure of this study was descriptive and comparative. Apart from the three areas they wanted to target, they also included some demographics like how long the teachers had taught, for how long and how many courses related to ADHD had they taken. All of this data was then input into ADHD for the analysis of it all. When the results were in they were able to see from four different tables the results. For the highest level of education, they saw that 79.5% had a BA, 20.5% had MA and none had a DO. For the number of courses taken about ADHD they saw that 66.4% had zero courses, 18.7% had one, 4.7 had two, 3.7% had three and 6.5% had four or greater. We can clearly see that the majority of the teachers had no classes taken about ADHD but yet were exposed to children in the school with the diagnosis. For the years of teaching experience, they saw that 29.0% had about one to five years, 21 .5% had six to ten years, 19.6% had eleven to fifteen years, 13.1% had sixteen to twenty years and 16.8% had twenty years or more. The last table showed us how in the three areas they wanted to test on the KADDS how they scored. The results showed that in the overall knowledge of ADHD it was a 17.39%, in recognizing symptoms of ADHD it was 17.88% and in knowledge of treatments available for ADHD it was 17.76%. Overall knowledge had the lowest score of the whole study sample, scoring at 17.39%. This showed the researchers that colleges or universities have not been effective in developing an appropriate education program when it comes to teaching and education teachers in the area of ADHD. Teachers were knowledgeable in knowing treatments for ADHD more than being able to identify it in their own classroom. The study also suggested that the more students that teachers are presented with ADHD that it may expand their understanding of it. Some of the limitations with this study were that not many teachers participated to be part of this study and also it was only done with middle school teachers in Texas, because of this I do not think that they got a broad perspective because of the amount of teachers and also, ADHD can be seen in children as young as five years old so maybe elementary school teachers should have been included as well. (Guerra Jr and Brown, 2012).