The evaluation of attentional orienting in Italians and Chileans children with ADHD: Effects of two different school integration strategies

The Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common psychiatric disorders in childhood. Different formal education systems seem to be more or less effective in improving the attentional performance of the ADHD children. The aim of this study was to assess whether two different school integration strategies, Italian special education teacher and Chilean School Integration Program (PIE), can differently affect the attentional performance of children with ADHD. Forty Italian children (20 ADHD, 20 control) and 40 Chilean children (20 ADHD, 20 control) aged between 8 and 13 completed the ANTI-V, which allows to simultaneously evaluate the three attentional components (alerting, orienting, executive) and directly measure the vigilance. A Group (ADHD, Control) x Nationality (Italy, Chile) x Cue (Valid, Invalid, No-Cue) x Warning (Warning, No-Warning) x Congruency (Congruent, Incongruent) ANOVA on accuracy showed a significant Group x Nationality x Cue interaction. Results have shown a significant difference within the Italian group between ADHD and control group children in the invalid trials. In the Italian ADHD group, there was also a difference between valid and invalid trials. These findings could suggest a higher difficulty for Italian children in reorienting their attention; specifically, this difficulty would be more accentuated in children with ADHD. To verify the effectiveness of these results, other analyses are needed. If these findings will be confirmed, the adoption of a similar program in Italy could allow proving the effectiveness of the PIE educational support in the ADHD treatment.