2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

College students with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may perceive teaching practices differently than students without ADHD, and their academic success may be especially influenced by classroom experiences. Students with ADHD are prone to distraction and inattention, and they must learn to manage the combination of a somewhat unstructured college environment, a predominance of lecture-based courses, and long-term assignments. There is ample evidence that teaching practices – including establishing instructor-student rapport and using an instructional style that supports learning– can promote academic success. However, The role of teaching practices on the academic success of college students with ADHD has received little study. In addition, few studies delve into how students with specific neurodisabilities can be influenced by particular STEM learning environments or pedagogical practices. Gaining insight into the strengths and challenges experienced by engineering students with ADHD can shed light on how specific classroom teaching practices either facilitate or obstruct their academic success. The goal of this work-in-progress study is to understand the role classroom teaching practices play in the academic success of students with ADHD.
This paper provides an overview of this study aimed at answering the following research questions: (1) How do engineering college students who have ADHD perceive how traditional lecture-based courses influence their academic adjustment, classroom experiences, and sense of belonging? and (2) How do engineering college students who have ADHD perceive that active learning influences their academic adjustment, classroom experiences, and sense of belonging? Through both semi-structured focus group discussions and individual interviews, we will collect data from approximately 50 engineering college students diagnosed with ADHD. They will share experiences from both courses where their instructor used active learning and courses where their instructor solely used lectures to convey class material.
We will analyze the participants’ interview data using deductive and inductive thematic analysis, working in the interpretative research tradition to emphasize participants’ meanings and interpretations of the world around them. We will perform the initial deductive coding of transcripts immediately following the interviews, and then we will apply a constant comparative method or inductive coding to perform open coding analysis and identify emergent themes. We will first identify initial codes relating to our research questions, and the focused codes (e.g., classroom experiences and academic adjustment). These analyses will allow us to clarify the role of teaching practices in directly influencing academic success and in mediating the effect of college factors and to gather evidence about teaching practices that support academic success of engineering college students with ADHD.