Category: ADHD - Child

Symposium 80 - Treatment for High School Students with ADHD: The Who, What, and When of Treatment Outcomes

Chair(s)

• SM

  Samantha Margherio, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)

  Assistant Professor
  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

Discussant(s)

• SB

  Stephen Becker, Ph.D. (he/him/his)

  Associate Professor
  Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
  Cincinnati, Ohio

Presenter(s)

• SE

  Steve Evans, PhD (he/him/his)

  Distinguished Professor
  Ohio University
  Athens, Ohio
• GD

  George DuPaul, Ph.D. (he/him/his)

  Professor of School Psychology
  Lehigh University
  Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
• SM

  Samantha Margherio, Ph.D. (she/her/hers)

  Assistant Professor
  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

Adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at risk of adverse outcomes relative to peers without the disorder, including increased likelihood of failing grades and high school drop-out (Kuriyan et al., 2013), elevated rates of problematic substance use (see Molina & Pelham, 2014), challenges with emotion dysregulation (Bunford et al., 2015), and family conflict (Johnston & Mash, 2001). The psychosocial treatment literature for adolescents with ADHD is in its infancy with existing evidence pointing to the effectiveness of organizational training interventions for this population (Evans et al., 2018). The Challenging Horizons Program (CHP) is a multi-component school-based training intervention for teens with ADHD targeting academic and social skill building. Across middle and high school samples, the CHP demonstrates positive gains in academic (DuPaul et al., 2021; Evans et al., 2018) and social (Evans et al., 2023; Schultz et al., 2017) domains at post-treatment and 6-month follow-up. Still, variability in treatment engagement and effects leave unanswered questions related to who will most likely benefit from the CHP, what level of treatment engagement is associated with positive effects, and how long effects endure post-treatment. Addressing these questions is necessary to building personalized treatment prescriptive practices and engaging families in informed decision-making about their adolescents’ treatment. The current symposium leverages data from a multi-site randomized controlled trial of the CHP among 186 high school students with ADHD (79% male; 1% Asian, 15% Black, 78% White; 11% Hispanic; 63% of parents had less than a college degree) to address these key issues by evaluating effects of treatment among youth who comply with treatment, examining predictors of treatment response, and exploring long-term outcomes of the CHP.