A student with ADHD or dyslexia who gets stuck in a regular class? It sometimes seems obvious: “They just need extra structure” or “That needs to be more explicit.” But what happens if you leave out that explicit support? What if you want to know how these students learn in situations closer to the real world, full of stimuli, without clear instructions?

That was the approach of a new study by Gabay and colleagues. They had young people with and without a diagnosis perform a game-like learning task series in which choosing the right stimulus based on colour, shape or texture paid off. In some versions of the task, it was stated in advance which aspect was important (the ‘explicit assist’), but in others, you had to figure it out through trial and error (the ‘no-explicit assist’). In short: learning as it often goes in real life – without a step-by-step plan, without a teacher who demonstrates.

What turned out? Both young people with ADHD and with dyslexia scored lower than their control group, in both versions. However, it only became interesting when the researchers examined how these lower scores came about using computational models. Young people with ADHD appeared to make less use of smart, probabilistic strategies (such as Bayesian learning) in the more complex task and relied more on simple stimulus-reward associations. In other words, they were less careful about what exactly determined their success. Young people with dyslexia showed something else: a higher ‘decay rate’. They forgot what they had learned more quickly, not so much because they did not want to learn, but because the associations faded more quickly.

The difference is subtle, but important. Although both groups ultimately performed less well, the underlying reason was different. For one group, it was about strategies and attention; for the other, about memory and retention. And that is precisely what makes this study so relevant to education. If you only start structuring more and explaining everything explicitly when dealing with learning problems, you may miss the point. Sometimes the problem is not the lack of explanation, but the rapid fading of connections. Sometimes it is not the inability to pay attention, but not knowing what to pay attention to.

In an earlier blog, I wrote that the real discussion about inclusive education should be about the how, not the where (link to blog). This study underlines that point once again. If you understand how different students learn – and how that learning differs – then the support search becomes much more precise. No longer: “They need differentiation.” But: “This student quickly forgets what he just learned, unless we build in repetition.” Or: “This student does not automatically look for patterns, unless we help him discover where the relevant information is.”

In this study, we saw that explicit instruction does help: all participants performed better on the task in which they knew which characteristic was important (colour, shape or texture). This also applies to young people with ADHD and dyslexia. Explicit help makes learning easier.

However, the study also shows that explicit instruction does not entirely eliminate the differences. Young people with ADHD and dyslexia continued to score worse than their control group, even with instruction. And on complex tasks without help, the differences became greater and mechanistically clear.

So:

Yes, explicit instruction helps.

But no, it is not always enough.

For some students, the problem is not that they do not receive any explanation but that they forget information more quickly (as with dyslexia) or that they have difficulty filtering relevant information themselves (as with ADHD). In such cases, more explanation is sometimes less effective than different support, e.g., repetition, visual support, or strategy instruction.

In other words, explicit instruction is a good start but not a universal solution. That is precisely why we need to discuss the how more in inclusive education.

Education for everyone, therefore, requires more than good intentions. It requires insight into the complex interaction between attention, memory, and learning strategies. This study contributes to that and clarifies that the ‘why’ of inclusive education is rarely the problem. The real work starts with the ‘how’.

Abstract of the study:

The current study examined how individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders navigate the complexities of learning within multidimensional environments marked by uncertain dimension values and without explicit guidance. Participants engaged in a game-like complex reinforcement learning task in which the stimuli dimension determining reward remained undisclosed, necessitating that participants discover which dimension should be prioritized for detecting the maximum reward. For comparison, a control condition featuring a simple reinforcement learning task was included in which the predictive dimension was explicitly revealed. The findings showed that individuals with ADHD and dyslexia exhibited reduced performance across both tasks compared to their controls. Computational modeling revealed that relative to controls, participants with ADHD exhibited a markedly decreased ability to utilize demanding yet more optimal Bayesian inference strategies, whereas participants with dyslexia demonstrated heightened decay rates, indicating quicker discounting of recently learned associations. These findings illuminate different computational markers of neurodevelopmental disorders in naturalistic learning contexts.