Self-concept in children with attention deficits

This study focuses on the BASTA project (basic skills, social interaction and training of the working memory), which studied children with attention deficits and hyperactive behaviour attending remedial classes in regular schools. The project is interdisciplinary, with research teams from both social science and medicine. Our study is both qualitative and quantitative with a socio-cultural approach, and focuses on the pupil's social interaction, self-concept and the classroom climate. This article reports on the results of the study on self-concept. Our supposition was that the pupil's self-concept should change when they improved their skills in reading, writing and mathematics, but this was not the case. The results showed the dominating pattern to be that the differences between data from the BASTA project and comparison data from a similar study on academic self-concept, social self-concept, personal self-concept and global self-concept are small to nonexistent. Our results indicate that the children studied report higher degrees of self-concept than were warranted and that entering remedial classes was often linked to previous academic failures, social failures or both.