Neurodevelopmental disorders – Transdiagnostic Approaches

Implications for intervention

If you just use diagnostic labels, it can be problematic, children may have symptoms outside
of their diagnosis
Interventions are rolled out that lack a solid evidence base

Improvements translate into everyday improvements, scalable and can implement them in
practise

Evaluating intervention for transdiagnostic mechanism of working memory

- WM is capacity to hold material in mind and manipulate as necessary for brief period

Poor working memory – fail to hold on to the goal of the task

Those struggling at school and those with ADHD very similar, equally impaired. Are
diagnostic labels useful

Can use performance on WM tasks to predict how well children do at school, irrespective of
diagnosis

Interventions
- Computerised games to improve WM
- 45 minutes, 25 sessions, 6-to-8-week period, around 15 hours
- Developed in Sweden in early 2000s
- Brain training – came about without a solid evidence base

Do people get better on the tasks they’re being trained on

- Overall trend was that people did get better
- Do children get better when you actively train

- Adaptive children who went through real training

- Feasible in primary not secondary

- Phonics programmed

Phonological processing

Intervention design
- Struggling learners going through intervention – intense
- Struggling learners going through intervention – less intense
- Struggling learners as a control
- Assessment before intervention
- 8 weeks
o 1 session for less intense
o 2 sessions for more intense
- Assess all 3 groups at end of block