Performance of children diagnosed with ADHD on selected planning and reconstitution tests

A sample of 177 children between the ages of 8 and 12 years, 93 participants diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 85 control participants, were administered selected tasks from the WJ-III Tests of Cognitive Abilities, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-III (WISC-III), and WISC-III PI that targeted various reconstitution skills such as aspects of planning and reasoning. Planning from the WJ-III Cog, Wechsler Mazes from the WISC-III, and Elithorn Mazes from the WISC-III PI were used to measure the concept of planning Concept Formation and Analysis Synthesis from the WJ-III Cog were chosen to represent reconstitution. Results indicated that age and gender were not contributory factors to differences on the selected measures. IQ was found to be contributory and was used as a covariate in all analyses. The overall results of the study indicated a need to further divide the broad category of ADHD into its subtypes when analyzing performance on measures of executive functions, particularly reconstitution. A large effect size was found for Concept Formation and results of this study suggested that the Predominately Inattentive Type and Combined Type of ADHD had the most difficulty on this task, as shown by the significantly lower scores on the measure when compared to the control group and the Predominately Hyperactive-Impulsive Type. The Predominately Inattentive-Hyperactive Impulsive Type did not have any significant difficulties with any of the measures used on this task as evidenced by the small effect sizes. Further areas to investigate such as metacognitive strategies, distinct problem solving strategies, incorporating feedback, and utilizing response inhibition are discussed.