Here is a question I received today.

Good afternoon Jason,
(snip)  I am a researcher who assisting a foundation in their effort to establish a new charter school to serve students with ADHD. The curriculum would be taught through project-based learning and other interest-based models, specifically the Big Picture Model.  We have recently been declined by the school district’s board of directors. The reasoning behind the board’s decline was that the population of students we wish to serve would not be able to sustain this type of independent learning. Therefore, I am currently searching for real, valid research that shows this type of learning is possible. I am specifically looking for reaserch that would address the following questions:

1. Are children with ADHD able to become more engaged in learning when the topic/subject is interesting for them? If so, how?
2. Can students with ADHD learn/succeed in project-based learning models?

Given your position and interests, I hope that you can point me in the right direction. Thank you in advance for your time and effort to respond to my questions.

My response was as follows:

I don’t know about research on ADHD students specifically but will try to keep an eye out for this.  There is research that PBL benefits low performing students in general (because they were not successful in traditional instruction!)  (snip).  IIn general, it seems to makes sense you would want ADHD kids to be active, not sitting passively.

Our survey did not focus on special needs students, but in our analyses we saw no relationship between PBL use and the percent of students who qualified as special needs.  PBL was actually used slightly more, not less, with continuation/transfer students too.  (Spreadsheet attached). 

All for now.  Feel free to keep in touch.  I’d be very interested to hear about the results of your research.

Curtis, D. (2002). The power of projects.  Educational Leadership. 60(1), 50-53.

This article by Diane Curtis has a section called “Motivating Hard-to-Reach Students” in which she discusses a boy named “Chris” who attended an alternative high school in Cortez, NM because he was not successful at a traditional high school.  The principal of the school observed that during PBL days working on a construction-related project for the school Chris was “totally involved”...“not bummed out, not lying around, not causing trouble for other kid…willing to do the reading and writing part because he knows he’ll be using a shovel later”. 

Although we do not have data on ADHD students per se, this observation is consistent with the idea that PBL can help students who do not do well in a traditional classroom.  It certainly supports our findings about alternative high school students.

Erin wrote back to say

At 09:39 AM 6/29/2009, you wrote:

Hi Jason,
Thank you so much for your help! Given what we’ve found, I think we are going to build a case linking the needs of ADHD students to what PBL offers. I will definitely look at that article today.

Erin

Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Mohandas Gandhi

To which I replied:
Glad to help.  I asked one of our national faculty on Friday who told me that some kinds of ADHD kids are easily distracted.
As a result, *poorly* implemented PBL, e.g., with a lot of off-topic discussion/activity going on, is really bad for these kinds of kids!

I asked him if it would be worse than having to sit quietly.  He couldn’t say but seemed to think so. 
His suggestion is to start with very small activities to learn how to focus on these, before starting larger projects.
...and to make sure teachers know how to plan PBL effectively.

Seems like “it depends” is almost always the answer, and research should focus on answering the question “on what?” rather than if “it works”.

I don’t know much about the topic of ADHD myself, but encourage you to keep going and let me know what you find.  Best of luck,

Jason

Of course PBL will engage students, so it could capture the passions of someone with ADHD or one with any other syndrome.  The reason I suggest that it “depends” is because the same disfunction the student with ADHD faces in other circumstance will impede the student in this environment.  Someone with ADHD needs to have support to learn how to cope and maximize their learning, and often the teacher must help with providing structures to help focus and guide.  It’s important to recognize that impulsivity, disorganization and lack of focus won’t be fixed by having an engaging project, even if students with ADHD demonstrate intense focus in some specific activities within the project.  The student with ADHD would prefer not to be disengaged and disruptive, but without supports (sometimes including therapy and or medication), the PBL environment alone will not be enough.  It could actually make things worse, with the ‘busy’-ness and sometimes appearance of chaos as multiple activities happen at once, and some students with ADHD will escalate their (mis)behaviour.  If the facilitator/teacher is alert to changes of behaviour their gentle guidance, refocusing, alerting student through practiced cues, and other strategies can be used to help the student.  Also, if the student with ADHD has mastered some calming techniques silent cues can be enough to help the student retain his or her dignity, and slow themselves down.  It’s important to reframe how we think of students with ‘invisible’ issues that impair their learning (and sometimes students around them).  It’s easy to be tolerant of the student in the wheelchair who knocks over a table when moving through a classroom, but it’s harder to tolerate the impulsive action of a student with ADHD because they lack the physical evidence of their difference. Those working with students with differences need to have training so we can ensure their ‘sparkly’ personalities and enthusiasm are a positive addition to the classroom community, and it often takes a fair bit of reading and professional development on our part. . . sadly, PBL alone is not enough.

Jason Ravitz - 29 June 2009 10:25 AM

Erin wrote back to say

At 09:39 AM 6/29/2009, you wrote

I asked him if it would be worse than having to sit quietly.  He couldn’t say but seemed to think so. 
His suggestion is to start with very small activities to learn how to focus on these, before starting larger projects.
...and to make sure teachers know how to plan PBL effectively.

Seems like “it depends” is almost always the answer, and research should focus on answering the question “on what?” rather than if “it works”.

I don’t know much about the topic of ADHD myself, but encourage you to keep going and let me know what you find.  Best of luck,

Jason

Jason, your response “it depends” makes complete sense.  However, I thought I’d give you a little insight to the immense difficulty learners with ADHD face as your well-intentioned idea about starting with smaller activities might help a student learn how to focus on larger activities is off-target.  Someone with attentional problems might be completely successful on a small, time-limited activity, but it there are a multitude of factors that could have influenced that focus, and the success demonstrated once or even a few times does not necessarily reflect learning how to focus.  The same time-limited activity for the student with ADHD might be a complete disaster at another time.  Unfortunately, it’s hard to comprehend that someone who has been able to engage one time but cannot the next time isn’t deliberately being disruptive, but it is evidence of the syndrome.  This is why it’s vital that those working with students with ADHD at the very least learn what it is, and some strategies to cope with the frustrations of working with this type of student, and ideally, some strategies for helping the student develop organizational tools and the refocusing/calming techniques.

Those who are following this thread might be interested in a article I just posted.

It addresses the effectiveness of PBL with mainstreamed special education students.

http://www.bie.org/research/study/inclusion_and_problem-based_learning

I’m a teacher who works with students that want an online computer science degree and I do have some experience with PBL from my early teacher years. PBL was mainly designed for students that have low results in class and it focuses on offering alternative teaching methods. Kids/people with ADHD do not necessarily have low results in class, but they do have a problem with keeping focused on something that doesn’t meet their high energy burst. So if you adapt PBL somehow you could use it for ADHD kids/people, but be advised that ADHD people can be very smart people with a high rate of learning power. Sometimes their main problem is that the rest of the class and the teacher can’t keep up the pace.

I think that PBL could be used and I’m also interested in some examples of how we can use this model for higher education. I would like to use it for my information security degree online class. I’m always trying to improve my work and I think the PBL model could help me do that. My students deserve the best and I want to offer that. Hope you can help me out with a few examples. Thank you and looking forward to hearing from you back.

There are lots of people here who ask for help with PBL for higher education classes. I for one would need some help with PBL because I’m a teacher for a fire science bachelor degree. Does anyone have experience with this specific line of teaching? I would be grateful for any kind of help or example. Hope some can offer some advice and guidance.

My opinion is that one of the best things you can do today is to get a certificate of negotiation. That can help you in many situations that occur in schools. I hope you agree with me on this matter.