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Pathways to higher education can appear opaque and unattainable to rural adults, despite the affordances provided by modern broadband and increasing provision of university online learning options. This paper describes an innovative partnership model that connects rural adults to university and technical and further education pathways through 'warm connections' developed between staff in rural libraries and 'neighbourhood houses', and people working in university outreach and preparation programmes. Through the Warm Connections project, local staff were provided with training and on campus experiences that equipped them to have conversations with rural people about what university is 'like' and what it takes to get a place in a university course. Rural community staff reported being confident in providing customised front-line information and advice to rural residents and were able to direct enquiries to appropriate people in tertiary institutions. Some staff themselves enrolled in and successfully completed university short courses, providing role models for their communities. The project reduced the socio-economic distance between rural adults and tertiary education. It successfully built social capital networks of 'warm connections' between tertiary institutions and rural communities, although the longevity of those networks will depend on continuing effort by tertiary institutions to maintain and refresh connections.

Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience a host of social problems, in addition to significant impairments in behavioral inhibition, working memory, and self-control. Behavioral inhibition and working memory difficulties have been linked with social functioning deficits, but to date, most studies have examined these neurocognitive problems either in isolation or as an aggregate measure in relation to social problems, and none has considered the role of self-control. Thus, it remains unclear whether all of these executive functions are linked with social problems or if the link can be more parsimoniously explained by construct overlap. Fifty-eight children with ADHD and 63 typically developing (TD) children completed tests assessing self-control, behavioral inhibition, and working memory; parents and teachers rated children's social functioning. Examination of potential indirect effects with the bootstrapping procedure indicated that working memory mediated the relation between group membership (ADHD, TD) and child social functioning based on teacher but not parent ratings. Behavioral inhibition and self-control did not have direct relations with either parent- or teacher-rated social functioning. These findings point to important differences regarding how executive functioning difficulties manifest at school compared to home, as well as the specific executive function components that predict ADHD-related social difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study examined competing predictions of the working memory and behavioral inhibition models of ADHD. Behavioral inhibition was measured using a conventional stop-signal task, and central executive, phonological, and visuospatial working memory components (Baddeley 2007) were assessed in 14 children with ADHD and 13 typically developing (TD) children. Bootstrapped mediation analyses revealed that the visuospatial working memory system and central executive both mediated the relationship between group membership (ADHD, TD) and stop-signal task performance. Conversely, stop-signal task performance mediated the relationship between group membership and central executive processes, but was unable to account for the phonological and visuospatial storage/rehearsal deficits consistently found in children with ADHD. Comparison of effect size estimates for both models suggested that working memory deficits may underlie impaired stop-signal task performance in children with ADHD. The current findings therefore challenge existing models of ADHD that describe behavioral inhibition as a core deficit of the disorder.

Objective: Classroom- and laboratory-based efforts to study the attentional problems of children with ADHD are incongruent in elucidating attentional deficits; however, none have explored within- or between-minute variability in the classroom attentional processing in children with ADHD. Method: High and low attention groups of ADHD children defined via cluster analysis, and 36 typically developing children, were observed while completing academic assignments in their general education classrooms. Results: All children oscillated between attentive and inattentive states; however, children in both ADHD groups switched states more frequently and remained attentive for shorter durations relative to typically developing children. Conclusion: Overall differences in attention and optimal ability to maintain attention among the groups are consistent with laboratory studies of increased ADHD-related interindividual and intergroup variability but inconsistent with laboratory results of increased intra-individual variability and attention decrements over time. (Contains 3 figures and 1 table.)

The current study investigates two recently identified threats to the construct validity of behavioral inhibition as a core deficit of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) based on the stop-signal task: calculation of mean reaction time from go-trials presented adjacent to intermittent stop-trials, and non-reporting of the stop-signal delay metric. Children with ADHD (n = 12) and typically developing (TD) children (n = 11) were administered the standard stop-signal task and three variant stop-signal conditions. These included a no-tone condition administered without the presentation of an auditory tone; an ignore-tone condition that presented a neutral (i.e., not associated with stopping) auditory tone; and a second ignore-tone condition that presented a neutral auditory tone after the tone had been previously paired with stopping. Children with ADHD exhibited significantly slower and more variable reaction times to go-stimuli, and slower stop-signal reaction times relative to TD controls. Stop-signal delay was not significantly different between groups, and both groups' go-trial reaction times slowed following meaningful tones. Collectively, these findings corroborate recent meta-analyses and indicate that previous findings of stop-signal performance deficits in ADHD reflect slower and more variable responding to visually presented stimuli and concurrent processing of a second stimulus, rather than deficits of motor behavioral inhibition.

The current study investigated contradictory findings from recent experimental and meta-analytic studies concerning working memory deficits in ADHD. Working memory refers to the cognitive ability to temporarily store and mentally manipulate limited amounts of information for use in guiding behavior. Phonological (verbal) and visuospatial (nonverbal) working memory were assessed across four memory load conditions in 23 boys (12 ADHD, 11 typically developing) using tasks based on Biddle's ("Working memory, thought, and action," Oxford University Press, New York, 2007) working memory model. The model posits separate phonological and visuospatial storage and rehearsal components that are controlled by a single attentional controller (CE: central executive). A latent variable approach was used to partial task performance related to three variables of interest: phonological buffer/rehearsal loop, visuospatial buffer/rehearsal loop, and the CE attentional controller. ADHD-related working memory deficits were apparent across all three cognitive systems--with the largest magnitude of deficits apparent in the CE--even after controlling for reading speed, nonverbal visual encoding, age, IQ, and SES.

Background: Most classroom observation studies have documented significant deficiencies in the classroom attention of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared to their typically developing peers. The magnitude of these differences, however, varies considerably and may be influenced by contextual, sampling, diagnostic, and observational differences. Methods: Meta-analysis of 23 between-group classroom observation studies using weighted regression, publication bias, goodness of fit, best case, and original metric analyses. Results: Across studies, a large effect size (ES = 0.73) was found prior to consideration of potential moderators. Weighted regression, best case, and original metric estimation indicate that this effect may be an underestimation of the classroom visual attention deficits of children with ADHD. Several methodological factors--classroom environment, sample characteristics, diagnostic procedures, and observational coding schema--differentially affect observed rates of classroom attentive behavior for children with ADHD and typically developing children. After accounting for these factors, children with ADHD were on-task approximately 75& of the time compared to 88% for their classroom peers (ES = 1.40). Children with ADHD were also more variable in their attentive behavior across studies. Conclusions: The present study confirmed that children with ADHD exhibit deficient and more variable visual attending to required stimuli in classroom settings and provided an aggregate estimation of the magnitude of these deficits at the group level. It also demonstrated the impact of situational, sampling, diagnostic, and observational variables on observed rates of on-task behavior.

Deficient behavioral inhibition (BI) processes are considered a core feature of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This meta-analytic review is the first to examine the potential influence of a wide range of subject and task variable moderator effects on BI processes--assessed by the stop-signal paradigm--in children with ADHD relative to typically developing children. Results revealed significantly slower mean reaction time (MRT), greater reaction time variability (SDRT), and slower stop-signal reaction time (SSRT) in children with ADHD relative to controls. The non-significant between-group stop-signal delay (SSD) metric, however, suggests that stop-signal reaction time differences reflect a more generalized deficit in attention/cognitive processing rather than behavioral inhibition. Several subject and task variables served as significant moderators for children's mean reaction time.

Objective: Findings from extant studies of the relationship between ADHD-related emotion regulation and working memory deficits have been equivocal, and their correlational designs preclude inferences about the functional relationship between working memory demands and emotion regulation. This study aimed to experimentally examine the functional relationship between varying working memory demands and ADHD-related emotion regulation deficits. Method: Overt emotion regulation behaviors were coded while children with and without ADHD completed experimental tasks that manipulated low and high working memory demands. Results: Compared with typically developing children, children with ADHD exhibited large-magnitude overall emotion expression deficits, disproportionately greater self-criticism during high working memory conditions, and disproportionately greater positive emotion expression during low working memory demand conditions. Conclusion: These findings suggest that working memory demands are functionally related to emotion regulation deficits exhibited by children with ADHD and may explicate variability of emotion regulation difficulties related to environmental demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stop-signal paradigm is the premier metric of behavioral inhibition in contemporary attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) research. The stop-signal paradigm's choice-reaction time component, however, arguably places greater demands on working memory processes (e.g., controlled-focused attention) relative to alternative inhibition metrics (i.e., go/no-go (GNG) tasks), and consequently obscures conclusions about inhibition and working memory deficits in affected children. The current study, therefore, aimed to determine whether shared variance between stop-signal behavioral inhibition and working memory performance in children with ADHD reflects overlap between the working memory and inhibition constructs or insufficient specificity of the stop-signal paradigm. Fifty-five children (8–12 years) with and without ADHD were administered established phonological (PH) and visuospatial (VS) working memory measures, as well as stop-signal and GNG tasks that vary with respect to demands on controlled-focused attention. Although working memory and GNG performance each uniquely predicted children's inattention, stop-signal task performance was not a significant predictor of unique variance in inattention, above and beyond variance associated with working memory. Collectively, these findings suggest that performance on the stop-signal task, compared to the GNG task, is confounded by greater demands associated with working memory and consequently reflects an impure estimate of the inhibition construct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]