Research project on improving attention and executive function in ADHD children, BrainX
About The Programme
Logo of the institution
My role: coach
To record participants' physical performance during the neurocognitive training
To make sure all participants stay focused on the training
Experience Description
At the beginning of this semester, I participated in a half-year research project for ADHD primary school children. The project is co-organized with BrainX, a neurocognitive training center that uses advanced technologies to enhance trainees' attention and executive function.
Wearing a non-invasive device that measures brain activity, participants can activate cognitive games developed by the center and control the movement of game characters with their minds. Basically, the more attention they pay to the game, the higher the score they get.
As a coach, I was responsible for keeping trainees focused and recording their behaviors that cannot be detected by the device. Different from what I imagined watching kids play happily, the job was much more difficult than I expected. After the novelty of the first two weeks, the kids began to complain about the difficulty of paying attention to the same games. They may suddenly stop working, scream loudly, make meaningless noises, or even refuse to finish all tasks.
When I met such a situation for the first time, all I could feel was overwhelmed and frustrated. Fortunately, another coach, who has years of experience working with young children, was always there to help me. With her guidance, I gradually learnt how to react to different situations.
For instance, if kids feel tired in training, I would empathize with them and comfort them using languages like "I know it's hard to get up so early for training", or "you did so well! Finish playing three games and I'll give you a small break". While for children who strongly resist doing tasks, it would be more effective to reason with them and motivate them with rewards. Tokens were given to those who can finish all tasks, keep quiet all the time, or improve their training performance so that children will behave well to collect those tokens and trade them for small gifts.
Analysis and Reflection
Achieved GELOs: Judgments, Awareness, and Engagement
Through this experience, I discovered that I am good at learning from others. I was able to evaluate the situations and use strategies learnt from more experienced teachers to comfort or encourage children who were facing difficulties (Engagement). But it was still too challenging for me to handle more complicated cases like children who refuse to cooperate at all or often conduct extreme behaviors. So, there are always more things for me to observe and learn.
Though still not in a real-time classroom setting, this experience gave me a visual sense of how difficult and painful it is for children with ADHD to stay concentrated on learning. Sometimes, they really had the internal desire of performing better, but their physiological conditions just didn't allow them to achieve that goal so easily (Awareness). As educators, we should never label them simply because of their misbehaviors. The most important is to find motivators and resources for them to learn better and help them to control themselves to obtain what they want through effort (Judgments).