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A large body of evidence shows that many of the academic difficulties Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) children have may be related to their problems in executive control. However, the particular case of expressive writing has not been deeply explored. The present study examines the typical school exercise of writing a letter. Participants were 33 third, fourth, and fifth graders referred by teachers for the presence of ADHD symptoms plus 33 controls. The task consisted of describing an aspect of their life in the form of a letter. Texts of ADHD children were poorer than those of the controls for structure, vocabulary, grammar, length, and accuracy. Furthermore, the difference persisted even when a guide was used to support the writing task. However, the two groups were not significantly different in a metacognitive test measuring knowledge on critical factors affecting expressive writing. Results show that ADHD children may encounter severe difficulties in expressive writing that are not due to differences in knowledge about how to write. Educational implications are discussed.
Un grand nombre d'études a demontré que les enfants avec une diagnose de ADHD presentent de problèmes dans le controle executive, mais le cas de la production du text écrit, qui est lié aux processus executives, n'a pas été bien étudié. Le present etude examine le cas de l'écriture d'une lettre, avec 33 enfants qui présentent les symptoms de l'ADHD et 33 enfants de controle. Les resultats demontrent que les enfants AHDH ont une bonne representation metacognitive de comment un bon texte est écrit, mais produisent un texte qui a beaucoup de faiblesses sur le plan de structure, vocabulaire, grammaire et orthographie. Neanmoins des instructions qui insistent sur la connaissance sont capable d'ameliorer la production. On conclude que, dans les cas des enfants ADHD, l'instruction ne doit pas se baser seulement sur la connaissance, mais aussi sur les procedures.
