The Task Matters: A Scoping Review on Reading Comprehension Abilities in ADHD

Abstract

Objective: A broad range of tasks have been used to classify individuals with ADHD with reading comprehension difficulties. However, the inconsistency in the literature warrants a scoping review of current knowledge about the relationship between ADHD diagnosis and reading comprehension ability.

Method: A comprehensive search strategy was performed to identify relevant articles on the topic. Thirty-four articles met inclusion criteria for the current review.

Results: The evidence as a whole suggests reading comprehension is impaired in ADHD. The most prominent effect was found in studies where participants retell or pick out central ideas in stories. On these tasks, participants with ADHD performed consistently worse than typically developing controls. However, some studies found that performance in ADHD improved when reading comprehension task demands were low.

Conclusion: Results suggest that performance in ADHD depends on the way reading comprehension is measured and further guide future work clarifying why there are such discrepant findings across studies.

Keywords: ADHD; passage comprehension; reading comprehension; scoping review; story comprehension; text comprehension.