Improving educational outcomes for children with ADHD

What research suggests about teaching explicit planning skills

Planning doesn’t come naturally for most children with ADHD. Imagination and insight, yes, but organising learning for storage and retrieval is not necessarily intuitive. Ask a child what sort of planning they have done for an essay, and you’re likely to hear that they prefer to free-style in the moment. As you might imagine, the constraint of planning can actually feel uncomfortable.

Researchers at the Link Campus University (Rome) and the University of Messina recently conducted an experiment to explore the relationship between intelligence, planning skills and academic achievement, published in the Journal of Intelligence. I’ve attached the research link at the end of the blog. 

While the study ostensibly looks at what differentiates gifted academic, gifted non academic and ‘normal’ academic children, what I found interesting is what the results suggest about teaching explicit planning skills. ‘Gifted’ children, regardless of academic achievement level, naturally planned their strategy before starting the task. Students who are not gifted but do well in school also plan their task before starting, although that planning took 50% longer. Both groups achieved the same results in the end, suggesting planning speed is irrelevant: being ‘gifted’ did not in and of itself ensure better results.

What did correlate with academic achievement was metacognitive regulation, the capacity to manage and consciously direct one’s own thinking, of which planning is one working part. Metacognition is not fixed at birth, the way IQ appears to be. It is built through explicit instruction, modelling, and practice, in the same way a child learns to check their working in math or to plan a paragraph before writing it.

For neurodivergent young people, especially children with ADHD, this distinction suggests a concrete path towards improved performance. At all levels of primary and secondary education, teaching explicit task planning may make a significant contribution to long term academic success. Teaching a child how to select a strategy before diving in and how to pause at the threshold of a task rather than whirling through it, constitutes meaningful, specialist support. Planning, monitoring and adjusting thinking as one progresses through a task is a teachable skill, whether or not it is an inherent trait.

What can be tricky is that young people who are playing catch up with late assignments will want help to just get the task done. This ultimately undermines a longer term solution to chaotic academic strategies. Teachers, parents and support staff need to be steady in the face of an agitated pupil under time pressure - as an example if nothing else. Schools can also prize a well planned first paragraph, rather than dismiss the task as unfinished.

Planning for tasks and assignments is the first step towards planning for revision and timed exams. Our kids are often granted extra time, and knowing what to do with it falls under the remit of metacognitive regulation.

The gap between potential and performance is rarely a gap in intelligence. It is a gap in instruction, and teaching a child to plan, deliberately and explicitly, remains the most reliable route to closing it.

Caprì, T., Catalano, G. B., & Fabio, R. A. (2026). The contribution of executive functions to academic achievement in gifted children: A cross-sectional study. Journal of Intelligence, 14(3), 44. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence14030044