Evans Gets Grant for Video Game to Help Kids with ADHD Learn Academic Skills

Dr. Steven Evans

A $1.38 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education will fund the development of a new video game designed to help kids with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) learn academic skills and better succeed in school.

The three-year project is led by psychology researchers Dr. Brandon Schultz, Assistant Professor of Psychology at East Carolina University, and Dr. Steven Evans, Professor of Psychology at Ohio University.

The project will help school teachers reinforce lessons about note-taking, assignment tracking, academic materials organization and study strategies with students who may struggle with these skills — especially as they advance into middle school and high school.

The researchers will work with Ohio University’s Game Research and Immersive Design (GRID) Lab at Ohio University to create the video game, which will use a storyline about mysterious extraterrestrials. The hope is to capture students’ interest wile teaching them how to gather and organize information, according to Schultz, an assistant professor of psychology at East Carolina University who previously worked at Ohio University as a clinical research scientist.

The video game lessons will be based on the Challenging Horizons Program, a series of interventions Evans developed to help teachers focus on the most critical academic skills that students with ADHD lack. Those skill gaps not only hinder students from excelling in the classroom, but lead to behavioral problems as well.

Students with ADHD require a lot of practice and repetition of these skills, as well as performance feedback from teachers, in order to learn them, explained Evans, a professor of psychology and director of the Center for Intervention Research in Schools (CIRS) at Ohio University.

“By doing this in a video game, hopefully the students will be enhancing the learning of those skills,” Evans said.

Read more at the news release “New grant to fund video game designed to help kids with ADHD learn academic skills.”

Also see the report in Science Magazine.