Programs for ADD

Online Clinical Software Monitored By Professionals

Fast ForWord, our series of programs for ADD can help the following symptoms:

• Drifts off in class
• Reads for short periods only
• Is easily distracted when doing homework or reading
• Is a slow worker, taking tests or completing homework

Processing Undermines Focus
These common symptoms of ADD or Inattentive Attention Deficit Disorder or ADHD-PI (Predominantly Inattentive) are most often caused by a processing deficit that makes listening and reading comprehension both difficult and exhausting. The student therefore struggles to stay engaged, leading to concerns about ADD.
Checklist of attention deficit symptoms

How Our Software Helps ADD

Gemm Learning uses Fast ForWord, cognitive software with self paced exercises that target the causes of ADD, and build attention stamina. Here is the approach:

1. Target Processing Deficits That Cause ADD
   By speeding up processing, a pervasive cause of ADD and ADHD in children, Fast ForWord effectively slows the world down, making listening comprehension more accurate, less exhausting and more interesting. This same improvement in processing helps phonological awareness, a crucial reading skill. Easier comprehension promotes student engagement and focus.


2. Training Specific Attention Skills
   Fast ForWord has exercises that help ADD in its various forms:
   
   
   • Impulsiveness. One exercise challenges the student to wait for a match, to process a list of alternatives that lengthens over time as the student succeeds, penalizing premature or erratic decisions. Reduced impulsivity helps focus for test taking, social situations, homework, reading and listening in class.
   
   
   • Inattentiveness. Attention stamina is an important learning and test taking skill, that children with sound processing skills tend to learn naturally. Most exercises only progress with consecutive correct responses -- this escalating requirement for consistent accuracy and concentration trains attention stamina.
   
   
   • Distractibility. Several exercises have escalating extraneous activity that seeks to pull the student off task, replicating the distractions of the real world. By gradually learning to resist these distracters, students learn selective attention, the ability to stay focused and on task -- in class, doing homework and while reading.
   
   
   

   All exercises use adaptive technology to build attention skills slowly but surely over the 3-4 months that children are on the program. These skills integrate with other cognitive functions, meaning the improvements in attention skills become part of the student, used and practiced daily, and so the gains endure.



3. Improve Working Memory
   In the last decade or so, researchers have focused on the importance of working memory in helping children build attention skills. Working memory is the mental juggling that a student uses in math or when listening to a story, for example. She has to hold onto the numbers while working with them. Or, she needs to remember the sequence of events and also think of what the story is about.
   
   Increased working memory capacity allows for more engagement with the material. Most exercises in Fast ForWord have a component that strengthens working memory skills.


4. Better Reading & Comprehension
   Our programs improve reading skills, first by making decoding automatic and effortless, then by building vocabulary, spelling, and reading comprehension. Automatic (effortless) decoding makes it easier to read for longer periods, a prerequisite to eventual reading proficiency. It also makes it easier to extract meaning from the text, making it more interesting, another contributor to improved focus and reading stamina.
   More about reading and ADD

While the early signs of improvement from our program are almost always reading or language-based, the perspective of parents a year or so after program completion is almost always focused on the improvements in focus and on learning independence.
ADD Program FAQ

Your Next Step: A Free Consult?

Help for ADD is by nature complicated. If you have questions or are unsure if our treatment is right for your ADD child, please call to find out. The 15-minute consult is free. If you would prefer a consult outside standard hours, Monday-Fridays 9AM to 9PM EST, simply complete this request.
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