The development of early intervention strategies for children with symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is important because it provides an opportunity to prevent severe problems in the future. The main purpose of this investigation was to determine the efficacy of a group training for the control of attention, working memory and impulsive behaviors, involving five-year-old children with ADHD symptoms. Twenty-six children with ADHD symptoms and 26 with typical development were randomly divided in two conditions. 13 children in each group were assigned to the training condition and the other to the business as usual condition (normal class activity). Children who participated in the intervention showed an improvement in the tasks measuring their control of attention, impulsive behavior and working memory. Moreover, children with typical development who attended the training also improved their competencies. The results confirm the importance of an early intervention for preschool-age children with ADHD symptoms.

It has been argued that children with learning disabilities (LD) encounter severe problems in working memory (WM) tasks, especially when they need to update information stored in their WM. It is not clear, however, to what extent this is due to a generally poor updating ability or to a difficulty specific to the domain to be processed. To examine this issue, two groups of children with arithmetic or reading comprehension LD and a group of typically developing children (9 to 10 years old) were assessed using two updating tasks requiring to select the smallest numbers or objects presented. The results showed that children with an arithmetic disability failed in a number updating task, but not in the object updating task. The opposite was true for the group with poor reading comprehension, whose performance was worse in the object than in the number updating task. It may be concluded that the problem of WM updating in children with LD is also due to a poor representation of the material to be updated. In addition, our findings suggest that the mental representation of the size of objects relates to the semantic representation of the objects’ properties and differs from the quantitative representation of numbers.

Introduction: Preschoolers with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been found to exhibit impairments on neuropsychological measures of working memory (WM). As WM is an important predictor of future learning abilities, early intervention could help to prevent severe problems. The purpose of this research was to ascertain the efficacy of an intervention for training WM in 5-year-old children with symptoms of ADHD. Method: Thirty-four children with symptoms of ADHD were randomly divided into two groups: One was assigned to the WM training condition, and the other continued normal class activities. The training was provided at school in small groups that also included typically developing children. Results: The trained group showed a significant improvement in tasks measuring their WM and other controlled processes at conclusion of study, whereas no significant improvement was found in the control group. Conclusions: We concluded that early intervention on WM may be effective in children with symptoms of ADHD.

Objective: The hypothesis behind this study was that trained teachers using cooperative learning procedures with children in their classroom (aged from 6 to 10 years) can influence the social skills of children with ADHD symptoms and their acceptance by their peers. Method: The study involved 30 children with ADHD symptoms attending 12 different classes, where cooperative learning was adopted in some, and standard practices in others. ADHD children’s symptoms, social skills, and cooperative behavior were assessed by means of a teacher’s questionnaire, and the social preferences of the children in their class were collected. Results: Changes emerged in teachers’ assessments of the children’s cooperative behavior in the experimental classes. Improvements in the sociometric status of children with ADHD symptoms were only seen in the cooperative learning classes. Conclusion: These results show the importance of well-structured intervention in classes that include children with ADHD symptoms. Implications of these findings for future intervention are discussed.