Needs Assessment

Television, movies, and video games have become such a huge part of today’s children. As a result from such dependence, there are many more kids that suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. The project that I am proposing is to study these children to see if there is a difference in the way that they learn, or how as teachers we can help them learn better.
I think that this is such an important topic to study, because there are so many kids that are diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, some of which do not even have it. I feel that in the future this disorder will become more prevalent in our school systems, and we are going to have to learn to teach them. There is the option for medication, but each child that has this disorder will not be taking the medication. We must be able to help these children achieve their full potential without taking time away from the other children.
As an IDST major with minors in Math and Social Studies and a concentration on education, I feel that we should study children with this disorder to see how best they learn in the separate subjects. For instance, math and science are closely related as well as English and social studies; I would like to see if kids with ADD/ADHD learn better in certain subjects and how they learn in those subjects. I would then like to find a way to structure the curriculum to help these students learn better, especially in the areas that they struggle the most.
I think that this is a very important aspect to a child’s learning that should be researched. I have talked to many elementary school teachers that have taught kids with ADD/ADHD and they did not exactly know how to approach it; or the kids were on medication and the teachers struggled on the days that these kids did not take their medicine. I feel that when teachers do not know how to handle these children, not only does in hinder the learning of the child with the disorder, it also hinders the learning of the rest of the children in the class. I feel that the prevalence of children with ADD/ADHD is only going to get worse in the future; so we should learn to teach these children now so we can maximize the learning of all the children in the classroom.