Home and School Disagree Most on Gifted Children With ADHD

What the ratings showed

Mothers of gifted children with ADHD returned a mean inattention score of 72.41 on the Conners 3. Fathers returned 72.35. The teachers of those same children returned 63.66, and all three sets of adults were rating the same children on the same instrument during the same assessment.

Conners 3 scores are standardised so that 50 is average for a child’s age and sex, 65 to 69 counts as elevated, and 70 and above as very elevated. Both parents placed these children in the highest band. Teachers placed them below the point at which the questionnaire registers a concern at all.

Ninety-two French-speaking children aged six to 16 were assessed between 2015 and 2021 at a university clinic in Longueuil and a private clinic in Montreal. Juliette François-Sévigny, Mathieu Pilon and Laurie-Anne Gauthier of the Université de Sherbrooke reported the comparison in Brain Sciences in 2022. Clinicians sorted the children by full assessment into 35 gifted children with ADHD, 35 with ADHD alone, and 22 gifted children without ADHD, with giftedness set at a WISC-V score of 130 or above. Mothers, fathers and teachers each completed the questionnaire separately.

The divergence held to one group. Among the children with ADHD and no giftedness, the three raters converged on inattention, at 70.71 from mothers, 66.39 from fathers and 67.67 from teachers, with no significant difference between respondents. Among the gifted children with ADHD, teachers sat significantly below both parents, at p below 0.001 in each comparison, with partial eta squared values of 0.34 and 0.32 against a conventional threshold of 0.14 for a large effect.

Teachers were also reporting things the parents were not. In the non-gifted ADHD group they rated executive functioning difficulty higher than fathers did, at p equal to 0.005. They rated gifted children with ADHD above non-gifted children with ADHD on hyperactivity and impulsivity, 61.87 against 57.17, a separation that mothers’ and fathers’ ratings did not produce. Teacher-reported learning problems was the single element that most clearly distinguished the two ADHD groups, at 55.14 for the gifted children against 65.75 for the others.

What to do with two reports that disagree

The study offers no way to rank the informants, and its authors do not attempt one. No independent record of the children’s classroom attention was collected, so neither form can be checked against anything outside itself. The design measured the size and location of the disagreement.

The explanation the authors favour concerns setting. A classroom is structured, externally paced and supplied with an adult holding the sequence together, and a child with high ability can spend that ability covering the difficulty, which is the masking effect the twice-exceptionality literature describes. Sustaining that cover across a school day is expensive, and by the time the child is home the compensation has been spent. Parents also hold years of comparison against what the child has previously managed, where a teacher has one year. That reading is the authors’ interpretation of the pattern rather than something the design tested.

Several limits qualify all of this. The Conners 3 as a whole failed to separate gifted children with ADHD from non-gifted children with ADHD, which is a caution about the instrument in this population; girls were a quarter of the sample; every family had already sought an assessment, which may have coloured how parents completed the forms. The divergence itself was measured directly, in three raters describing the same children.

Two forms that disagree are two observations made under different conditions, and the question that keeps both in play at a meeting is what those conditions were. What does the classroom supply that the kitchen table does not, and what has the child already spent by four o’clock? Where a clinician holds both forms, treating the higher score as an observation of one setting keeps it in the record instead of having it averaged down toward the lower one. The teacher’s lower rating carries the same standing, and in this study the classroom observation of learning did work no other rater’s observation did.

Nearly nine points separate the two accounts. A file that records the difference, and names the setting each observation came from, describes your child more completely than either form on its own.