Anne Fleur Kortekaas-Rijlaarsdam

CHAPTER 4 86 Testing was done individually in a quiet room within the primary school of the child. Total testing time was 120 minutes (including breaks). Testing occurred during plasma peak levels of methylphenidate (Banaschewski et al., 2006). On testing days, teachers and parents were asked to fill out the SPPC and SPSRQ-C covering behavior on the previous seven days. In each medication condition, treatment duration was 7 days. This allowed parents to observe their child’s behavior when medication was active, particularly during weekends and during two additional afternoons on which children of 8-12 years are at home from school. Thus, parents observed their children for a total of three full days in each condition, including breakfast and dinner. Teachers observed their students for three full school days and two school mornings. After a short explanation of the procedure, testing started with the SPPC, followed by the Flanker task, visuospatial working memory task, CAIMI and verbal Digit Span backwards. The TD group was assessed only once. Testing procedures were identical in the ADHD and TD group, with the exception that the testing of the TD group was preceded by a short version of the WISC-III to estimate TD children’s IQ as TD children were first seen on the day of the assessment. Participants with ADHD received a small gift. R E SU LT S Group characteristics of the ADHD and TD group are shown in Table 4.1. In our ADHD group we included 14 children in grade 4-5 (age 8-9), 19 children in grade 6 (age 9-10), 17 children in grade 7 (age 10-11) and 13 children in grade 8 (age 11-13). Our TD group included 19 children in grade 4-5, 14 children in grade 6, 16 children in grade 7 and 18 children in grade 8. Comparisons of Cognition, Motivation and Competence of ADHD and TD Group Table 4.2 displays the results for the academic, executive functions (EF), motivational and competence measures of the ADHD group during MPH and placebo and for the TD group. Three subjects in the TD group and two subjects in the ADHD group had missing data on the measure of accuracy for mathematical word problems. On the EF measures, data were missing for one ADHD subject for the verbal working memory task, the visuospatial working memory task and the Flanker task. For the TD group, data were missing for one subject for the verbal working memory task and for two subjects on the Flanker task. Missing values were not imputed.