Struggling Through A Screen; Remote Learning and its Impact on Students with ADHD

“This is stupid.” 

The long wall of small-sized text sitting on the MacBook screen before her was both a minor annoyance and an immediate obstacle to the completion of her work. While at first frustrated, she eventually settled in, found her flow and got to work. 

When she was writing two-hundred word replies to Blackboard discussion posts, the soundtrack was Mac Miller. Her ability to focus on work while listening to music with lyrics was impressive. It’s a skill some never learn to master. Now that her work became more demanding, however, it was clear that this skill wasn’t as solidified as I had initially thought.

“Alright, now I need lo-fi cause I gotta read,” she said as she changed playlists.

The “she” in question is Kimberlie Tolkov, a senior Psychology major and Sociology minor at SUNY New Paltz. Tolkov was diagnosed with ADHD around her junior year of college, but she told me that she had struggled with the idea of having it for a while before.

“I’ve always known I had ADHD, but I never went to a doctor about it because when I was younger I thought I was just stupid,” Tolkov told me. “Maybe almost ten years of my life I never talked to anyone about it. I literally just thought I was stupid, until I came to college and realized no, I’m not stupid, I just have a mental issue.”

According to the American Psychiatric Association, ADHD is one of the most commonly diagnosed developmental disorders, affecting approximately 8% of children and 2.5% of adults. ADHD makes life hard enough for students who have it, but remote learning as a result of COVID-19 has made their lives even harder.

“That’s what our research and other research is suggesting is that, on average, students with ADHD are struggling more than their peers without ADHD,” said Rosanna Breaux, a psychology professor and researcher at Virginia Tech that specializes in childhood psychology. 

Prof. Rosanna Breaux, who agreed to conduct a Zoom interview surrounding her study

Breaux conducted a study that focuses on the impact that remote learning and stay at home orders had on a group of 238 adolescents. 118 of them had ADHD.

The findings of her study concluded that all students, ADHD or not, struggled as a result of remote learning, but that those with ADHD struggled more, and that those with poor emotional regulation abilities struggled the most. Breaux defined emotional regulation abilities as, “the ability to manage your behaviors and your emotions in situations where you’re feeling a negative emotion.” Essentially, it’s the ability to not become overwhelmed when placed in stressful situations.

“People who are not getting angry because their computer’s not working and they can’t submit their assignment, are generally having better outcomes,” said Breaux.

She said that those with poor emotional regulation were more likely to experience feelings of anxiety or depression as a result of remote learning.

A chart included in Breaux’s study, which highlights the ways in which students with low ER exhibited worse symptoms in regards to inattention as well as hyperactivity/impulsiveness

In the students I had interviewed who struggled the most, this finding proved to be true. Tolkov described the time before she was prescribed Adderall as one of overwhelming stress and anxiety, with a severe decline in academic performance. She had trouble focusing, she procrastinated and she struggled to stay on top of her work. That led to self-blaming and self-shaming, further worsening her depression and anxiety.

“The whole first semester of online schooling has made me realize, yeah, I need to get my shit together, I need to get Adderall, which I’m thankful for because it really made me change,” said Tolkov.

SUNY New Paltz student Abby Parker, who agreed to be observed while she completed her school work

Another New Paltz student suffering from ADHD, senior Abby Parker, also had a similar experience. Parker said her mental health "plummeted" once remote learning began.

“I hate this shit,” said Parker, looking forebodingly at her laptop.

While observing Parker as she did work for her online French class, her anxiety surrounding remote learning was easily apparent. She frequently sighed, fidgeted with her hands and was more than comfortable with distracting herself from her work to engage in side conversations with me as I observed. 

Parker said that she had thrived in the classroom environment because it gave her a much needed social dynamic between her peers and professors. 

“I often gauged my success by comparing my in class progress to the progress of my peers,” Parker said. “I also felt a stronger sense of respect for the professors, therefore making me feel a strong sense of responsibility to complete the work they assigned.”

Just like Tolkov, Parker found her inability to engage with remote learning as a reason to foster feelings of self-contempt. 

“At first it was really hard to grasp why I couldn’t manage school like everyone else,” said Parker. “I felt stupid and I was constantly beating myself up.”

While Breaux’s study was conducted on adolescents, she believes that her research reflects the feelings and experiences of college-aged students as well. Breaux said that coping skills and the ability to take a step back from the stressors of online learning are essential to maintaining mental health, and that this advice applies for people of every age-group.

Breaux herself acknowledged the gaps of research on both college-aged students as well as young children, claiming the bulk of research on the topic was done on adolescents and older adults. College students may be harder to study, she thinks, because they could have proven harder to get a hold of, as well as too busy to join studies.

Breaux also pointed me in the direction of a study conducted by professor Michael Meinzer, of the University of Maryland. In this study, Meinzer and a group of other psychologists created a  support group in which qualified mental health professionals (coaches) would have weekly Webex meetings with college students with ADHD to listen to their complaints and struggles, and provide them with guidance and strategies to succeed. The coaches also provided students with daily checklists to complete, in an effort to build back daily routines that the pandemic has left so many students without. At the end of the study, the students were polled, and every student agreed that the support group was helpful.

Both Parker and Tolkov said that they would be enthusiastic participants in such focus groups.

Meinzer released a PDF alongside the study which included ways in which students could cope with and better adapt to the stresses of remote learning. The strategies included in this PDF, while certainly helpful if followed, are much less impactful without a person there to push students to actually adhere to them. This highlights a problem that every student interviewed made very apparent; the onus is placed on the students to learn how to be engaged and to educate themselves, not on the professors.

“You kind of really have to teach yourself a lot of things,” said Tolkov.

“I wish my professors took the time to reach out to me and other struggling students to check in and see how they could help,” said Parker.

Both Tolkov and Parker told me that they had to adapt to remote learning by realizing that they themselves were in charge of asking for help, and how the lack of a classroom environment made it harder for their professors to realize that they were struggling.

“Remote learning has created a divide where professors might not be able to see what kind of struggles a student is having, so taking the extra step to check in and form a relationship with their students could have drastically improved the learning environment for a bunch of people,” said Parker.

“They could be way more communicative with us, just asking how we are doing, if we need help with anything, or just simply answering our emails within a reasonable time because I feel that I have tried to reach out to my professors and either they don’t answer back or it takes them a long time to do so,” said Tolkov.

Tolkov and another New Paltz student with ADHD, Stephaine Jaijaram, who was briefly interviewed via text, also stressed the need for awareness in regards to the volume of assignments.

“They [professors] could have been more understanding with the workload,” said Tolkov. “They put a lot more work on you, and it gets hard to handle when every one of your classes is doing the same thing.”

Jaijaram told me that when she contracted COVID-19 this semester, her professors were anything but understanding.

“Obviously my work piled up, with extensions and work being currently assigned, and none of my business professors took that into consideration which made me feel so overwhelmed,” she said.

Breaux, a college professor herself, also addressed the difficulty in identifying struggling students and accommodating their needs.

“There isn’t the same personal connection, and it's a lot harder to want to reach out and advocate for yourself,” said Breaux. “There’s just so many factors and unfortunately a lot of the burden gets placed on the student to have to advocate, which obviously is an important skill, but also is an intimidating thing.”

Overall, communication between professor and student and flexibility regarding deadlines appeared to be the two most important areas of improvement that students highlighted.

Parker told me that she struggled to learn over a screen, and that regardless of any help, there was no way that she found she could be as engaged while remote as she would be in person. Breaux herself noted that in school children, those with learning disabilities such as ADHD often had the option to partake in specialized in-person classes, either one-on-one or with other students struggling with remote learning. 

While obviously the seriousness of the pandemic and the safety of both students and faculty must be considered when structuring courses, perhaps this option could be considered in the near future for students who especially struggle with remote learning. As it is now, there are still plenty of classes taken in person (mostly science and art labs, classes that require hands-on usage of school materials/equipment). 

Just like with labs, schools could make in-person classes available to students with challenges like ADHD. This seems especially possible as the nation’s vaccinated population continues to rise.

Ultimately, while the days of remote learning appear to be coming to a close, the lessons that can be learned on how to better accommodate students with ADHD in a remote learning setting will be undoubtedly valuable in the future, both near and distant. As vaccination rates rise, it would appear that COVID-19 is coming to an end in the United States, but vaccine hesitancy and lack of vaccine availability in other regions of the world could very possibly lead to the creation of a significantly vaccine resistant strain of the virus, potentially setting us back to square one in terms of restrictions. 

Global pandemics aside, the trend of remote learning is one that many in the field of education anticipate will grow in the future. In the fall of 2018 alone, a year before COVID-19, there were 6,932,074 American college students enrolled in at least one distance learning course. 

While the era of COVID-19 is one that the world is understandably ready to leave in the past, it can teach us many lessons which we would be smart to take with us in the future. How to properly engage and educate students who are struggling through their screens should be one of them.