BrainTrain is pleased to announce that Dr. David Rabiner, Senior Research Scholar at the Duke University Department of Psychology, has been awarded a three-year, 1.15 million dollar grant to study the effectiveness of computerized attention training with elementary school children with attention problems. Dr. Rabiner will compare the results of attention training using the Captain’s Log Cognitive Training System with curriculum based computer-assisted instruction. This Department of Education grant is the largest grant ever awarded for cognitive training research.

    Dr. Rabiner’s study is based on previous research that showed that students with attention problems are 500% more likely to be performing below grade-level in reading, math and written language. These findings are especially striking, since apparently about half of the students identified by their teachers as inattentive in this study had not presented problems that were severe enough to warrant a formal diagnosis of ADHD. This indicates that even moderate attention problems may have a strong impact on academic achievement. And what makes these findings even more dramatic is that teacher ratings indicating anxiety, hyperactivity, and oppositional behavior had no significant association with student achievement.

Other research has also shown that the effectiveness of one-on-one tutoring in helping children learn to readappears to  diminish progressively as attention problems increase. Dr. Rab-iner found that in children diagnosed with ADHD, tutoring appears to have no impact on reading achievement whatsoever.

    The usual interventions for children who are diagnosed with ADHD are stimulant medication treatment and behavioral interventions. Neither of these solutions has yet been shown to result in long-term gains in academic achievement. In addition, many parents are reluctant to keep their children on medication for long periods of time, and the side effects of long-term treatment with stimulants have been found to be adverse for some children, based on recent FDA and Canadian government warnings. Behavioral interventions can be difficult to implement in the school setting because of time constraints and additional demands on classroom teachers.

    Preliminary findings with the Captain’s Log system have shown great promise in helping to remediate attention problems in individuals of all ages. A large-scale study such as this one is vitally important, since it expands beyond the population of students formally diagnosed with ADHD and evaluates the long-term impact of attention training on academic success.