Mr. Attention - An Introduction The Attention Training System (ATS) was designed to assist children who experience difficulty concentrating and completing their academic assignments. Many of these youngsters will have been diagnosed as having on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) specific learning disabilities, oppositional behavior or various degrees of conduct disturbance. Others will not present with behavior problems, but will still require a great deal of structure and individual teacher attention in order to achieve academically. Empirical research as well as interviews with classroom teachers have shown that many inattentive children con indeed pay attention and complete assignments as long as adults provide them with constant feedback regarding their performance. Many of you have surely tried various techniques based on this principle, such as contingency contracting, token economies, behavior checklists, and verbal or written reinforcement. These strategies, if applied appropriately, tend to produce the desired results but require a disproportionate amount of teacher's time. Also it is often impossible for a classroom teacher to simply drop everything she/he is doing to help on individual child. Another drawback of these approaches is that they interrupt the child's ongoing activities. We have learned from careful experimentation and years of observing children with attentional problems that interruptions of this type frequently keep them from completing tasks. That is, the child will usually stop what she/he is doing and pay attention to the praise or token. You are then faced with the task of refocusing the child's attention. The ATS Circumvents many of these difficulties by providing children with immediate and continuous feedback without requiring the teacher to run around the classroom administering tokens or providing continual verbal feedback. As long as the child pays attention, our approach only requires you to observe the student's progress. The ATS is essentially a positive feedback system that assumes the child is on task (that is, paying attention). It consists of two separate devices: a Student Module that is place on a child's desktop or nearby but in full view of the child: and a small hand-held Teacher Module that you use to control the Student Module. The digital display on the Student Module increases at the rate of one point per minute. You will need to visually monitor the child's behavior from anywhere in the classroom as you would normally. If the child remains task oriented, the ATS does not require that anything be done. Again, this is one of the nice features of the system - you don't have to interrupt a child who is paying attention and completing assignments. On those occasions when a child fails to pay attention for greater than a few seconds, you simply press the button on your Teacher Module. Upon doing 50, the small red light on top of the Student Module lights up an a point is deducted from the accumulated total. This indicates to the child that he/she needs to return to the assignment. At the end of the academic period or at another appropriate time during the day, the total points the child earned are traded for a previously agreed upon incentive such as time in structured free-play, special activities, or desirable learning stations within the classroom. While the ATS offers an effective strategy for enhancing a child's attention, it is important to keep in mind realistic expectations. Most teachers who use the ATS have accumulated years of experience working with children who have learning problems. It is important that you not abandon your "tricks of the trade" once the ATS is operative. The system is intended to serve as an adjunct to and not a replacement for your finely tuned skills and abilities. A recurring characteristic of children with ADHD, learning disabilities, and emotional problems is that they demonstrate a great deal of variability in performance from one day to the next. While everyone has "on" days and "off" days, these children have more "off" days then most. This phenomenon will continue to hold true even when they are working with the ATS. When the system is used appropriately, however, they should have many more "on" days, and the "off" days should not be as extreme. Please contact us for more information about HEARIT