Courtney Lewis

Courtney is assessing medication adherence in college students. There are several reasons that college students may have poor medication adherence including mental health status, adverse side effects, and cost. College is a time where many students live on their own for the first time, so any parental figure in charge of administering or reminding about medication is no longer available. She will be collecting data from the students at the University of South Alabama. 

Dr. Jamie Spiegel in collaboration with Dr. Paulo Graziano

Although traditional models of ADHD propose that hyperactivity is a ubiquitous within ADHD and largely independent of task demands, more recent evidence indicates that more cognitively demanding tasks are associated with greater concurrent physical movement (Kofler et al., 2016). It is possible that more cognitively demanding tasks result in an up-regulation of movement to compensate for cortical under-arousal (Rapport et al., 2009). To date, most research examining the ubiquity of hyperactivity has been examined within the context of executive function tasks, with limited research examining more academically oriented tasks. The aim of this study was to examine the concurrent association between physical movement and academic/classroom performance in a sample of preschool- to kindergarten-age children, with and without diagnoses of ADHD. Physical activity was assessed via actigraphy data within the context of the Summer Treatment Program (STP-PreK), which provided a close approximation of an authentic educational environment.

Funding Source: This study was funded by an internal grant from Florida International University and the Center for Children and Families. Data were collected through the Summer Treatment Program (STP-PreK), in collaboration with Dr. Paulo Graziano, the founder and director of the STP-PreK program. 

Publications: Although data collection has been completed for this project, publications are currently ongoing. We will provide updates on published manuscripts here.