The Mirror of ERISED

The article I read for my January Exploring the Field entry was, "Children with Comorbid Speech Sound Disorder and Specific Language Impairment are at Increased Risk for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder," by Lauren M. McGrath, Christa Hutaff-Lee, Ashley Scott, Richard Boada, Lawrence D. Shriberg & Bruce F. Pennington.

The study was interested in the comorbidity of speech sound disorder (SSD) with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The purpose of their study was to fill what they considered a gap in the research of disorders comorbid with ADHD because previous studies did not use diagnostic criteria as precise as the current researchers employed and other comorbidity studies had focused mainly on links with reading disability (RD). They were also interested in the effect of specific language impairment (SLI) and two subgroups of SSD: persistent and normalized, on the symptomatology of ADHD.

108 SSD children and 41 controls ages 4 to 7 years were recruited and assessed for ADHD symptomatology by means of parent and teacher questionnaires and a DSM-IV ADHD rating scale. Children were also evaluated by the Sounds-in-Words subtest of the Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation.

The results supported their first hypothesis that participants with both SSD and a SLI would show more symptomatology for ADHD than the groups without SLI and the control group. More specifically, the group with both SSD and SLI showed higher rates of inattentiveness than the other groups. Parents and teachers reported a higher rate of impairment for this group than the other groups as well. The researchers also hypothesized that persistence (specifically normalized) of the SSD would interact with SLI to increase ADHD symptomatology. There was a significant interaction between persistence and SLI, but instead of the persistent-type SSD interacting with SLI to intensify ADHD symptomatology, the group with normalized-type SSD + SLI showed more intense inattentive ADHD symptomatology than the other groups.

The researchers explained an interest in contributing their findings to the pursuit of genetic etiology for ADHD and its comorbid disorders.

I chose this article because I am interested in everything concerning ADHD. I have looked into other facets of this disorder, but because of the nature of our Junior Seminar, I decided to see its relationship to language: a facet I have not specifically explored until now. This article especially peaked my interest because its participants were children of the age group I am most interested in studying with relation to ADHD.

My specific interest is in studying factors influencing the development of ADHD by children of pre-school to early elementary school age. All obstacles eliminated, I would really be interested in studying or conducting a study that would examine the effects of nutrition, physical exercise, and/or sleeping habits on the alleviation of ADHD symptoms in children of this age group.

Even though this article was not specific to my highest interest in ADHD, it was useful because it exposed me to another facet of the disorder that I had not yet explored. I would have liked to see the researchers use participants who had actually been diagnosed with ADHD by a professional, but the variables in the study were very interesting.

http://0-www.springerlink.com.allecat3.allegheny.edu/content/j171kj8j1247071j/fulltext.html

Here is a sample ADHD rating scale I found. I do not know if it is the exact scale used in the study, but it was interesting to see what the parents and teachers may have been rating.
http://www.fmpe.org/en/documents/appendix/Appendix%201%20-%20ADHD%20Rating%20Scale.pdf

Throughout this semester I plan to do a great deal of exploring the field. This can be very difficult since I really have no idea of which way I would like to go with my senior comprehensive study. I am ultimately interested in the school psychology and teaching fields; however, this does not help me to narrow anything down.

Later this spring I will be presenting a paper with some other Allegheny College students and one of our professors. The conference topic and research has started to spark my interest some and interestingly enough relates fairly well to the information covered in this junior seminar course. The conference is entitled Teachers, Teaching, and the Movies. I have found it interesting to look at how computer-mediated communications such as Second Life, Facebook and YouTube, along with many others can be used in teaching.

While looking through the Academic OneFile database I came across an article called Web 2.0: today’s technologies, tomorrow’s learning. This article by Groff and Haas was very down to earth and user friendly. The researchers have been looking at different case studies in which middle school and high school teachers are making their classrooms more technologically savvy. From the examples given there have been some trails to get passed; however, the results are great. With this generation of children being so into their video games and other technologies, it seems as though the best way to teach.

It is suggested that teachers join groups such as Ning, Facebook, Explore Science, and Club Penguin to learn more about these different games or simulations which can be used in the classroom to communicate skills and situations that are practically impossible to replicate live in a classroom. This gives students the ability to act through a computer using these virtual skills they obtain.

Students are so familiar with these technologies, or in most cases they are, that it makes learning even more fun for them. This is one way in which teachers can shape their teaching habits to encompass the hobbies of their students. Two teachers mentioned with success stories from these types of programs are Hal Scheintaub and Ross Fitzgerald. These teachers are able to bring situations to life for their students through the use of computer-mediated technologies in their classrooms.

This whole idea of making classrooms even more "virtualized" is so new to these times. It is very interesting to think that skills and knowledge can be obtained by doing something virtually. It is that idea that has become increasingly interesting to me. These ideas are something I hope to look into further, even though I am just beginning to try to narrow down what it really is that I would be interested in researching for my senior comprehensive study.

I'll be straightforward, honest, and blunt. No less than two days ago I had no idea what I wanted to do for my senior comp project. This fact was not due to any lack of thinking or planning on my part. On the contrary, I stressed about it probably more than most people did because it seemed like almost everyone else had a very clear idea regarding the subject and nature of their comp, and I was still in the "I have no [insert whatever you like here] idea" stage.

Needless to say, I was not looking forward to the end of my Junior year, my meetings with my advisor(s), or even this blog entry, because all of them required me to have a considerably more developed plan than what I was boasting at the time. Then, this morning I had a revelation. It happened where many of my revelations often do. It came to me in the shower.

I want to go into Elementary Education, and so language skills are very important to me. Several of the readings and discussions from our Junior Seminar class that involved the various effects of different media of communication (face-to-face, letter, e-mail, "txting") have intrigued me, and I realized this morning that none of them have mentioned the sequence effects of one on another. I forget the exact terminology for the effect (it's been a full year since I've taken a class in Psychological Statistics...order effects?), but I'm willing to bet that examining the grammar that people use in writing formal essays before and after writing informal e-mails (and vice versa) would produce interesting and worthwhile results. As it stands right now, my comp project will probably involve setting up a situation that can measure those effects.

As for research in the topic area, I figured that I would need some knowledge of what is considered more or less standard as far as the grammar and language mechanics used in electronic communication. Despite the fact that it is almost 17 years old, and e-mail and how use it have both changed a lot over those years, the study I found provides a very interesting view at how people view e-mail, how it is used, and, most interestingly, precisely what language mechanics are viewed as appropriate and inappropriate for e-mail. The study is entitled The Influence of Electronic Transmission on Written Communication, and was conducted by Joel P. Bowman of Western Michigan University.

The study was conducted in a business setting, and questionnaires were distributed to a group of participants, some of whom were business professionals, some of whom were academians, and all of whom were well-versed in the art of sending and receiving e-mails. The participants were asked to respond to questions on a survey that asked them about what is appropriate, effective, and desirable in e-mails. They were also asked to rewrite questions that they found inadequate, and these rewrites were adopted for the two subsequent surveys. When all of the responses were analyzed, it was found that, out of more than 80 items on each of the three surveys, not a single one was ever agreed or disagreed with by a signficant portion of the participants. In other words, the study failed to find a single concensus on the "rules" of grammar appropriate for e-mails.

This study concluded that the rules of what sorts of linguistic mechanisms are appropriate are still quite ambiguous, or at least they were in 1992 when the study was conducted. This implies that other forms of linguistic behavior, such as formal essay writing, that do have reasonably fixed and agreed-upon grammatical and mechanical rules, may affect the loosely-policed composition of an e-mail, especially if the e-mail is written in close temporal proximity to the writing of the formal essay.

I came across The Influence of Phonetic Abbreviations on the Evaluation of Student Performance, written by G. W. Lewandowski, Jr. and S. Harrington in 2006 by typing gramma* and impression formation into the fields in an academic search engine. These tags, along with the ideas of the effects of written communication on face-to-face communication/impression, seem to be the main themes of my research question as it currently stands. It was one of the very few entries that came up, so I was a bit discouraged, but decided to read the abstract over and give it a fair chance. It ended up being extremely informative, interesting, and helpful, and I can't believe that I didn't come across it until recently, even though I've been using generally similar search terms for the majority of my research for a while.

Two words that scare me quite a bit these days have been “senior comp”. I have never really been able to pin point where my great interest in research lies. Through the past few weeks of my Junior Seminar I have in a way been pushed to look at and read many different journal entries that are interesting to me. The use of computer-mediated communications and the idea of education have really seemed to connect for me in this Junior Seminar. I began thinking about other teaching methods used by professors and teachers and I began to notice that, other courses I have taken that have started using such teaching tactics. This gave me the idea to research a little further. Through this search I landed on a journal entry called Student Perceptions of Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communications in Face-to-Face Courses written by Yun-Jo An and Theodore Frick from the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

An and Frick performed a survey-based research experiment in search of answers to four research questions. The question first dealt with students’ comfort with computer-mediated communications (CMC) asking, “When compared to face-to-face discussion, do residential students feel comfortable in CMC? What are the factors that might affect perceived comfort with CMC in face-to-face courses?” The second research question explored specific types of tasks and the use of CMC which asked, “When working on different types of tasks (ambiguous, unequivocal, complex, simple, decision-making, and idea generating tasks), do students prefer face-to-face discussion of CMC? Why?” These questions were very interesting to me and just made me eager to find out their results. The final two research questions were, “What CMC factors do residential students perceive as satisfactory or as frustrating? What do residential students perceive as being needed for learning best from computer-mediated discussion?” These questions were very intriguing to me and since the research question for my project is still under construction and needs a lot of shaping these were able to give me good ideas of topics to research.

A consideration I took into account when reading about this research was the ability to perform a similar study here at Allegheny College. These questions gave me the confidence to know that something similar to this could be performed and researched at Allegheny College. This is a major consideration I would need to keep in mind if I wanted to perform a similar research topic here. The researchers used a simple survey which would be a great way to gather information about the topic.

The results showed that most students at the time would rather have face-to-face discussions opposed to computer-mediated communications discussions. While the researchers found these results they still found a good number of students who preferred these new teaching and discussion methods. They also gave further encouragement to future research. One topic of further interest that An and Frick suggested was the use of synchronous media in learning situations as apposed to their research of asynchronous media. I found this picture that really illustrates the new uses of computer-mediated communications:

This reserach can be found by clicking the earlier link or through this citation:

An, Y., & Frick, T. (2006). Student perceptions of asynchronous computer-mediated communication in face-to-face courses. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), 485-499. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00023.x

The article I read was "Grappling with the medicated self: The case of ADHD College Students," by Meika Loe and Leigh Cuttino.

The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of ADHD medication on the concept of self among college students diagnosed with ADHD. The study was conducted by interview, during which the interviewer asked questions about "experiences with diagnosis and treatment for ADHD, as well as on their educational background and understanding of success" (Loe & Cuttino, 2008, p. 305). Transcripts of tape-recorded sessions were coded for "symbols and themes" (Loe & Cuttino, 2008, p. 305). Common themes included discussing "'authenticity'" of a sense of self without medication and "'academic performance'" (Loe & Cuttino, 2008, p. 306). The researchers discuss their concern with a certain discrepancy between a student's sense of self while under the influence of medication and while not under that influence.

The interviews also touch on the subject of self dosing, and the range of dosing behaviors described by the students. Some students take the medication on a very consistent basis, others use the medication only when they feel they need it, suggesting a dual sense of self. Several students who were interviewed described a desire to cease medication after college and pursue a career that accentuated their behavior without medication, such as an Emergency Room Doctor.

With regard to academic performance, several students described a pressure by society to perform at an academic level only achievable for them with the help of medication. A very interesting statement from the discussion section of the article suggests that "academic rewards aside, accepting the ADHD identity usually requires acknowledging deficiency or limitation and managing a medicated identity" (Loe & Cuttino, 2008, p. 319). The article projects questions about the success of these students after they drop this medicated identity and want to join the workforce.

The main idea that I came away with from this article was that students with ADHD are struggling for control in an academic rat race and are adapting in varying ways. The means of adaptation I find most interesting is the plan to use medication to optimize academic performance, but ceasing medication upon graduation and finding a job that utilizes the positive characteristics of ADHD. It made a lot of sense to me to harvest one student's "overly ambitious" personality and desire "to do a billion things at once" to channel her skills into the career of ER doctor (Loe & Cuttino, 2008, p. 317). It seems unfortunate that she has to compromise these skills to succeed in the college that is supposed to prepare her for this career, but I like the idea of channeling the unique characteristics of ADHD instead of suppressing them. I understand that this may not be feasible for severe cases of ADHD, but it encourages me to pursue treatments other than medication for ADHD and to look into the classrooms and "academic ethic" that Loe and Cuttino suggest our society has created. If the results of future studies, perhaps including my comp, could suggest means of altering the educational system to channel the skills of ADHD students to help them learn instead of suppressing their "symptoms" with medication and labeling them with a diagnosis that suggests society finds them deficient, I would feel I had succeeded in helping the growing population of students with ADHD struggling to come to terms with a medicated self.

This article relates to my ideas for a comp project because if I am not able to secure a sample of children for my experiment, my back-up plan is to conduct the experiment with college students, so I am also interested in the effects of ADHD medication on my peers. This particular study is relevant because it was conducted using a sample of students in an environment very similar to that of Allegheny College. The school was a "selective private liberal arts college in the Northeast" (Loe & Cuttino, 2008, p. 305). This suggests that if I were to conduct a study using Allegheny students, this would be a very important source of information to base my experiment on.

I found this article on the PsycINFO database and had to order it from the Illiad service, but the abstract can be found here, or by logging in to the database and searching for the article's title.

Loe, M., & Cuttino, L. (2008). Grappling with the medicated self: The case of ADHD college students. Symbolic Interaction, 31(3), 303-323. Retrieved February 24, 2009, from PsycINFO database.

The study I read for my March entry of Exploring the Field was by Silverstein and Allison (1994), "The comparative efficacy of antecedent exercise and methylphenidate: a single-case randomized trial." This was especially interesting to me because the participant was a preschool child and if I had the ability to administer medication or to select a sample of medicated children, I would be especially interested in furthering this exact study with a much larger sample of children in a typical rather than special education classroom. This study is dated by comparison to much of the other research I have come across on this subject and discourages my hypothesis that antecedent exercise will reduce disruptive behavior, but is very important because (as it admits) it is one of very few studies that explore this topic. It also provides a methodology that would be easy to replicate without medication, and suggests a measure of hyperactivity that I might consider for my own project.

The participant was a 3-year-old African American boy who had been diagnosed with ADHD according to the DSM-III. The participant received all three conditions of 10mg of methylphenidate once a day plus attention placebo, antecedent exercise, which entailed 20 minutes of jogging, plus medication placebo, and the attention placebo plus medication placebo condition. Researchers describe the lasting effects of the medication as 4 hour after administration and the rigorous exercise as 24 hours, so the procedures for the conditions were alternated each day. The Conners' Abbreviated Symptom Questionnaire was used to measure hyperactive behavior. The results indicated that antecedent exercise was associated with the most hyperactivity, the placebo with less, and the medication with the least. Researchers suggest the implication of research of this topic will become even more important as children are diagnosed with ADHD at younger ages, specifically, during preschool. The perspective of this study seems to indicate that more treatments need to be developed because there are more preschool children that will be diagnosed and need this treatment, which is slightly counter to the idea of many of my other studies. Other studies suggest that behavior considered symptoms of ADHD in elementary school children are normal in preschool children because they have not yet physically developed the brain area that controls impulses so it is questionable to diagnose preschool children with a disorder.

I acquired this article through the Illiad service, but its abstract may be found in the PsycINFO database.

My past two Exploring the Field entries have focused mostly on the study of grammar in written communication and the effects that grammaticality has on the impressions formed by the readers of the author. During my research, though, I came across several pieces of research that had little or nothing to do with grammar but were still quite relevant to the topic I'm currently pursuing for my senior comp. One such study was conducted by N. Epley and J. Kruger and was published in 2005, and was entitled When what you type isn't what they read: The perseverance of stereotypes and expectancies over e-mail. I thought I'd give an article that wasn't related to grammar mechanics a chance to shine on my blog.

I have been working really hard on trying to figure out how to fit all of my information together and narrow down my topic. I never realized how difficult it is to be "picky" with which journal entries will be good enough and which ones will not be good enough with writing. Also a really difficult thing has kind of been figuring out how to use the journal searches to find exactly what I’ve been looking for. I found a great paper that has helped a lot in my introduction it is by Nicole B. Ellison and Yuehua Wu. The paper is entitled, Blogging in the Classroom: A Preliminary Exploration of Student Attitudes and Impact on Comprehension. This paper has really helped me in a way figure out which direction I want to go with my project and has given me more hope--There are articles out there for me!! :-)

Having, at least for the time being, seemingly depleted the PsycInfo database of all articles that relate to my senior research topic, I decided to go in a slightly different direction for finding an article to write about for this, my final Exploring the Field blog entry of the semester. The senior comprehensive project is most probably the largest and most involved project that I'll do at Allegheny, and for every major project that I do, I try to relate it to my aspirations to become an elementary teacher. I managed to find the article, Verbal Learning as a Function of Grammatical Structure by Sheela Singh, from way back in our bicentennial year of 1976. This study provided me with some strong connections between my research topic and my hopeful career field.

With the many ways that my senior comp research has been going I’ve been given the opportunity to look at many different research articles pertaining to literature on blogs, podcasts, and the many different subcategories that go into using them in the classroom. I have solidified the fact that I’d like to study CMC in the forms of blogs and podcasts to determine the effects that it has on student recall of information. The details of this have not yet been solidified but as I was looking further into the research and exploring the different methods I could use, I decided it might be pretty cool to make the design
2 x 2 mixed and include gender as a second variable. This is all still up in the air; however, with the background provided by Caspi, Chaujut, and Saporta it seems like it could be something interesting to look at.

"Sustained attention and social competence in typically developing preschool-aged children."
Bennett-Murphy, Laurie-Rose, Brinkman, & McNamara (2007)

I actually found this article by researching for a paper for a different class. I spent time with preschool children this semester through an internship, and for my final paper further explored the development of social competence during preschool. I came across this correlation study that was interested in whether children who had better sustained attention were more socially competent because they could attend to verbal and non-verbal cues during interaction with their peers. Bennett Murphy, Laurie-Rose, Brinkman, and McNamara (2007) used a five minute computerized visual vigilance task to measure sustained attention adapted for preschool children. The participants were forty preschool children, twenty boys and twenty girls ages 3-5 years. The vigilance task asked participants to hit the spacebar when they saw a target picture of a bird appear on the screen. Neutral stimuli were also presented, so children were asked to discriminate between the target symbol and the neutral stimuli. After the task was completed, the researchers assessed social competence by means of behavioral observation during free play according to the Howes Peer Play Scale. This scale assessed overall peer competence, gregariousness, and aggression. They also observed and evaluated object competence by assessing the use of toys during play (correct or incorrect: banging a toy truck against the ground vs. moving it along the floor). Results indicated that the more correct detections the child made during the vigilance task, the more likely he or she was to engage in social or reciprocal play; those who made the more errors of commission displayed more aggressive behavior. The results also indicated that children who were better able to detect changes in stimuli were more gregarious. Overall, the results suggested that the constructs assessed by the Howes Peer Play Scale were correlated to better performance on the computerized vigilance task that tested sustained attention.

This study has implications for my own study because it described and used an measure of sustained attention and it was successfully administered to preschool children. It also has implications for the real life application of my study, because I am trying to explore a means of increasing the sustained attention of preschool children, which this study suggests is correlated with social competence of children this age. If sessions of yoga can improve the sustained attention of preschool children, it could be suggested that children engage in yoga before free play because this could improve their social competence. The results of this study also suggest that children who made more errors of commission were more aggressive during social interactions, so perhaps if yoga is associated with a decrease in errors of commission on a vigilance task, children might be less likely to be aggressive during free play after a session of yoga. This study also extensively researched sustained attention, so it provided sources for me to explore in my own study about sustained attention of preschool children.

This article can be accessed through the PsycINFO database.