Visual aids help school-aged children with ADHD recount stories

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Credit: Adrian Skov (OIST)

Whether you’re sharing a funny story told by another friend or recounting the details of a text for a school exam, accurate storytelling and retelling are an integral part of everyday communication and children’s education alike.

A new study from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) has found that children aged 8-12 with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) retell less complete and coherent stories than their neurotypical counterparts, potentially putting them at a disadvantage in social and educational settings. Visual aids helped reduce the gap. Their findings, published in Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, pave the way for creating more inclusive learning and social environments for school-aged children.

Dr. Hend Samniya from the Human Developmental Neurobiology Unit (Professor Gail Tripp) at OIST explains: “Previous research on story retelling has focused on a narrow range of variables, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of its role in communication and learning of children with ADHD. It occupies a larger role in communication than we might imagine — sharing experiences, memories, or feelings is important socially and for children’s development.”

Visual aids improve storytelling, but do not remove performance gaps

In the study, English-speaking children aged 8-12, with and without ADHD, were told two short stories from Aesop’s fables with and without visual aids. Transcripts of the retellings were then coded by researchers to capture the narrative structure, fluency, and linguistic accuracy of each participant.

The researchers found clear differences in narrative ability between children with and without ADHD. They also confirmed that visual aids helped participants with ADHD retell stories better to a much greater extent than their peers, likely because neurotypical children already performed well without visual support. However, even with visuals, their performance did not match their peers. “It’s important to note that even though we could see the general differences between participant groups, each child experienced the challenges differently — there is no one-size-fits-all intervention,” adds Samniya.

Recognizing ADHD-related challenges beyond diagnosis

ADHD is a common neurodevelopmental condition, affecting an estimated 8% of children and 3% of adults worldwide.  While the lived experiences of every person with ADHD differ, the condition generally complicates participation in social settings, particularly those that carry a high expectation of rote performance and repetition. This especially impacts school-aged children, whose challenges with ADHD are known to impact learning performance and social relationships in classroom settings. Samniya summarizes:

“It’s encouraging to see ADHD receiving more attention in recent years. I hope that our study can help increase awareness about the diverse challenges faced by people with ADHD, and help educators, clinicians, and carers in recognizing potential language and communication difficulties early to create supportive spaces for children with ADHD.” 

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Journal

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology

DOI

10.1007/s10802-026-01494-3 

New book: case studies where university journalism programs provide, publish news

 The United States has lost more than 3,000 newspapers in the last 20 years. In most cases, those outlets are simply gone. 

A new book co-written by a University of Kansas professor of journalism examines what happens when universities step in to serve news deserts and what it means when “universities own the news,” according to the authors.

“News Desert U” by Teri Finneman, professor of journalism at KU, and Pamela Walck of Duquesne University details six case studies of universities that started publications to provide service to communities that no longer had their own newspaper.

There are many partnerships across the country in which journalism students provide news coverage of a given community to an existing company that oversees operations of the outlet. Those detailed in “News Desert U” are different.

“There is a group of faculty across the country seeing this problem of a need for more local news and knowing something must be done. Action must be taken,” Finneman said. “These faculty want to put their research and knowledge to use.”

As a result, a handful of them either started local news outlets themselves or helped save newspapers from closing. They now collaborate with students to keep local news alive.

The book, published by Bloomsbury, details six such operations in Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Nevada and Ohio. All six were unique in their formation, operation and structure, but all have lessons they can provide for the pros and cons of a university-operated news outlet.

Among the positives, the authors point out that journalism faculty have industry experience and knowledge as well as experience researching journalism and academic insight they can lend to the operations. Universities also have a renewable supply of students to provide coverage as well as multimedia equipment and often physical space for staff to meet, all of which allows them to provide operations at a fraction of the cost.

Significant challenges remain, however, and the authors point out that in cases where working for the outlet is part of a one-semester class, turnover presents difficulty in maintaining consistency or continuity in coverage. Further, universities often do not recognize the amount of time and work required of a faculty member to serve as a publisher and all the attendant roles, including generating revenue and serving as a community liaison, the authors wrote.

Each chapter details the unique work of university partnerships to address news deserts. In Iowa, the partnership saved two existing newspapers. In Kansas, students produce “Good Morning Indian Country,” a broadcast program to serve Indigenous communities. In Ohio, the academic news partnership ultimately was unable to continue.

In the conclusion of “News Desert U,” Finneman, who serves as publisher of the Eudora Times, another Kansas project, and co-author Walck argue there are many benefits a university community news partnership can provide. Furthermore, there are lessons that existing partnerships can provide, namely that universities would do well to support faculty members who take on the role. The book not only provides lessons learned but also questions a university should ask itself before taking on such an arrangement.

Finneman and Walck will host a “News Desert U” virtual conference Sept. 14 with faculty featured in the book discussing the structure of their publications, finances, student and community impact, and related topics. Registration is available online.

Eating disorders more common in teens from low socioeconomic backgrounds

Teenagers who come from households with a lower income and lower level of education are more likely to have an eating disorder, finds a new study co-led by UCL researchers.

The study, published in International Journal of Eating Disorders and in collaboration with researchers at Copenhagen University Hospital, reviewed data from 51 studies involving 26,174 adolescents from Western countries across North America, Europe and Australia.

It found that, contrary to common stereotypes, eating disorders don’t just affect wealthy and well-educated families, and that this assumption can lead adolescents from lower-income backgrounds to be overlooked, under-screened, or not recognised as at risk.

Senior author, Dr Nora Trompeter (UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health), said: “Eating disorders are often stereotyped as a problem of affluence but this review shows that this is not the full picture.

“Our review has found that teenagers from lower-income, lower-education households are actually more likely to show signs of disordered eating, not less.

“This tells us that disordered eating is a concern across the socioeconomic spectrum, and prevention and treatment efforts need to reach families facing financial and social disadvantage, who may currently be overlooked.”

Alongside diagnosed anorexia, bulimia and binge eating disorders, the review also included early warning symptoms of disordered eating, such as restricting food, fasting, poor body image and feeling a pressure to become thinner.

Family income showed the strongest and most consistent correlation. About two-thirds of the studies found that teenagers from lower-income families were more likely to have eating disorder symptoms, and no studies found the opposite.

The analysis also found that teenagers whose parents had more education were less likely to have symptoms of an eating disorder.

For example, teenagers whose parents didn’t attend university were around 25% more likely to report eating disorder symptoms than teenagers whose parents did go to university*.

However, other measures of social and economic background, such as how deprived a neighbourhood is, parents' jobs, financial difficulties, or receiving government benefits, gave much more mixed and inconsistent results.

Dr Trompeter said: “Eating disorders don’t discriminate by income or education. If anything, the evidence points the other way, and treating them as a ‘privileged’ condition risks leaving adolescents most in need of support undiagnosed and untreated.”

As a result of their findings, the researchers are now calling for clinicians, healthcare professionals, and school counsellors to broaden their assumptions about who is at risk of an eating disorder, to improve early identification.

Dr Trompeter added: “Challenging outdated stereotypes could help reduce missed diagnoses and ensure that those young people who are most in need receive timely treatment.”

The study was supported by grants from UK Research and Innovation and the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

Study limitations

Most studies involved mainly White adolescents from Western countries. The studies that were analysed also used different ways of measuring family socioeconomic status, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions.

*Education was measured in different ways across studies but broadly maps onto whether parents had a university-level education or not.

U.S. Students Above OECD Average in Science, Reading, and Computational Problem Solving

 

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) today released the U.S. results from the 2025 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international study of how 15-year-olds around the world apply their knowledge and skills to real-world challenges. Administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), PISA assesses student performance in science, mathematics, and reading. In 2025, 91 education systems participated, including 38 OECD member countries. U.S. students scored above the OECD average in science and reading, while the U.S. mathematics score was not significantly different from the OECD average. Average U.S. scores in science and mathematics were not measurably different from those in 2022, while the reading score was significantly lower than in 2022. PISA 2025 also introduced Learning in the Digital World, a new assessment that measures how students build knowledge and solve problems using digital tools. U.S. students scored above the OECD average in computational problem solving, one of the two reporting subscales of this new assessment. The report also examines longer-term trends across PISA cycles. The 2025 cycle was the largest in PISA's history, with more than 760,000 students participating across 91 education systems. PISA 2025 was the ninth cycle of the assessment, which was first administered in 2000. View the full report on the PISA 2025 U.S. Results page. Learn more about PISA.

Tracking Inequality: Teachers and the Allocation of Educational Opportunities

Professionals routinely make consequential decisions for others without systematically observing how those decisions turn out. Whether such decisions reflect accurate forecasting or systematically distorted beliefs has important implications for equality of opportunity. 

This study looks at this question in the context of teachers' recommendations for high school tracks by combining nationwide administrative data, randomized vignette experiments, belief elicitation, and a field experiment. 

Holding students' academic performance and interests constant, teachers are significantly less likely to recommend demanding academic tracks when students come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. This differential treatment is accompanied by systematically inaccurate beliefs: teachers substantially overestimate the probability that high-achieving disadvantaged students will fail in academically demanding schools. 

The authors then provided teachers with personalized feedback on their previous recommendations and objective information on the realized success of disadvantaged students. The intervention substantially reduces socioeconomic gaps in recommendations for high-achieving students. Effects are concentrated among boys assigned to teachers with the largest prior recommendation gaps and the most inaccurate beliefs. 

Among the high-achieving disadvantaged boys most affected by the intervention, these changes translate into higher enrollment in demanding academic tracks, without detectable adverse effects on short-run academic performance. 

Do games make children more attentive or more distractible?

 A study of preschool children found that brief digital or traditional gameplay improved performance on tasks requiring quick responses, but reduced performance on tasks demanding greater concentration and self-control.

Digital technologies are now part of the daily lives of many children, and video games are among the most engaging forms of play during the preschool years. However, despite their widespread use, the debate regarding their cognitive consequences remains open. Numerous studies have examined the long-term effects of video games on cognitive development, yet little is known about the immediate psychological effects of brief play sessions in early childhood.

Studies involving school-aged children, adolescents and young adults have generally reported positive or neutral effects of video gaming, with no consistent evidence of negative impacts. However, in preschool-aged children, because the brain mechanisms responsible for attention, self-control and the management of distractions are still developing, the effects of video games may be more pronounced than at later stages of development.

With support from the Bial Foundation, Andrea Facoetti, Sara Bertoni, Sandro Franceschini and Giovanna Puccio (University of Padua, Italy) led a study involving 48 typically developing children with a mean age of 5.4 years to investigate whether a brief play session - digital or non-digital - temporarily alters the balance between attentional processes and cognitive control.

In the article “Brief digital and traditional gameplay transiently reallocate attentional resources in preschool children”, published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, the authors explain that each participant was assessed under three different conditions: a control condition with no play activity, a 30-minute session of an age-appropriate action video game (Mario Kart 8 Deluxe), and a 30-minute session involving a traditional construction-based game (Tangram). Following each condition, the children completed tests assessing attention, speech-sound processing, visual perception and motor coordination.

The findings showed that both video games and traditional games produced similar immediate effects. After the play sessions, children performed better on tasks requiring the rapid detection of relevant stimuli. In contrast, the same pattern was not observed when tasks demanded greater cognitive control. When children had to ignore visual distractions, their performance declined following the play sessions. Moreover, these effects became more pronounced as task complexity increased.

The study suggests that brief and emotionally engaging play experiences - whether digital or traditional - may temporarily enhance more automatic attentional processes at the expense of control and regulatory abilities that require greater cognitive effort in preschool children. The determining factor appears to be the level of psychological engagement and attentional activation generated by the activity, rather than the type of game itself.

From an educational perspective, the findings suggest that the period immediately following an intense play activity may be less suitable for tasks requiring sustained concentration, self-control or resistance to distractions. Conversely, it may represent an opportunity for activities that benefit from rapid responses, active exploration of the environment or efficient detection of relevant information.

“Understanding this short-term multisensory and sensorimotor modulation is essential for guiding the integration of digital play into early childhood learning environments,” emphasise the authors.

Learn more about the project “153/24 - Psychophysiological activation and learning (to Learn): Evidence from action-like video games to mindfulness” here.

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Journal

Computers in Human Behavior Reports

DOI

10.1016/j.chbr.2026.101183 

Children’s suicide-related emergency visits spiked by 74% in the US

 Emergency visits by children with suicide-related crises increased by 74% between 2016 and 2022, according to a new study from scientists at Northwestern University and Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

The study represented more than 5 million emergency department (ED) visits for mental health concerns by U.S. children in the six-year period. About half of suicide-related ED visits — and half of all children’s mental health ED visits — occurred in hospitals with lower pediatric volume (under 10,000 annually). A child experiencing a mental health crisis may arrive at any emergency department, and many are not prepared to care for children with acute mental health needs, the study authors said. 

“Our findings underscore the need to equip every ED — not only large pediatric centers — with tools and resources to provide evidence-based mental health care,” said lead author Dr. Audrey Brewer, assistant professor of advanced pediatrics and primary care at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Strengthening mental and behavioral health capacity across all emergency care settings is essential to ensuring children receive timely, effective and equitable care.”

The study was published Sept. 3 in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

Brewer, who also is a pediatrician and researcher at Lurie Children’s, stressed that all EDs need additional training and access to pediatric mental health professionals, either onsite or via telehealth, as well as linkage to follow-up care. Additionally, she said every ED also needs to offer universal suicide screening for children, regardless of if they come in for a mental health concern. And if there are concerns, EDs should provide families with a clear plan to help keep their child safe at home. 

The study analyzed ED visits among children ages 5-17 with a primary mental health diagnosis, using the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample database. 

Additional findings:

• All pediatric mental health-related ED visits increased by 24% during the study period
• Suicide-related ED visits increased 74% during the study period
• The most frequent mental health diagnosis groups were suicide or self-injury (24%) and depressive disorders (23%)
• Indigenous children were more likely to come to EDs with lower pediatric volume
• Youth with substance use concerns were seen more often at lower pediatric volume EDs
• At EDs with the lowest pediatric volume, close to 30% of children seen for mental health conditions were transferred to other hospitals to receive definitive care

“Transfer to another hospital for pediatric mental health care often means a prolonged wait in the ED, sometimes lasting days, increasing the burden on children and their families,” said senior author Dr. Jennifer Hoffmann, assistant professor of pediatric emergency medicine and medical social sciences at Feinberg and a pediatric emergency medicine physician and researcher at Lurie Children’s. “Toolkits are readily available to help EDs care for children with mental health needs, especially while kids wait for a transfer to another facility.” 

Hoffmann said EDs across the country can access the New England Regional Behavioral Health Toolkit, as well as the National Pediatric Readiness Project, to improve the care provided to children, including youth with mental and behavioral health conditions.

“To improve care, ED-based mental health interventions need to be developed and tested for children of color, since many have not been studied in diverse populations,” Brewer said. “Delivering culturally responsive, evidence-based interventions for children in the community and outpatient primary care settings can help to potentially lessen ED reliance for mental health care and may help reduce disparities in youth mental health outcomes.”