Helping Students with ADHD in Palm Beach County

How C8 Sciences is Helping Students with ADHD in the Classroom – Like Those in Palm Beach County’sChrista McAuliffe Middle School – Through its Innovative ACTIVATE Program

Cognitive training has helped children with ADHD overcome barriers by increasing their attention, memory and processing speeds. Leading entities such as C8 Sciences understand that these skills are necessary not only inside the classroom, but out. Across America, students such as those attending Christa McAuliffe Middle School in Palm Beach County, Florida have been using an innovative cognitive cross-training program to enhance “executive function” skills critical in the classroom. Marketed by Connecticut-based C8 Sciences, the program known as ACTIVATE™  is designed by a leading neuroscientist in an NIH-funded research program at the Yale School of Medicine, for the purpose of targeting eight critical areas of executive function: Sustained Attention, Working Memory, Speed of Processing, Response Inhibition, Cognitive Flexibility, Category Formation, Pattern Recognition and Multiple Simultaneous Attention.

Christa McAuliffe Middle School found itself with a limited budget and time to access computers, yet its staff still needed to find a way to improve the Sustained Attention, Working Memory, Response Inhibition and Cognitive Flexibility of the students in the school. They turned to C8 Sciences and its ACTIVATE™ program, knowing children have a chance of overcoming cognitive weakness through using such a program that focuses on executive functions. Students learned skills through the brain games-like computer program and adaptive physical education curriculum; this fed real-time data to teachers and administrators on the exact status of a student’s EF skills at any given time.

How to Help ADHD Students in the Classroom at the Middle School Level

So what’s the goal at the middle school level? The ACTIVATE™ program increases the student’s ability to plan, organize, pay attention to details and manage time while they deal with increased academic expectations and class schedules. Simply put, the technology focuses on the brain to improve this “executive function” among students. Further, with a rising demand for proof and substantiating recommendations and placement decisions, educators have turned toACTIVATE’s™ extensive tracking built into the system. Student strengths are recognized clearly while weaknesses are made visible, allowing educators to radically change student achievement for all the children that they serve.

How Cognitive Training Also Makes Financial Sense to School Districts

Did you know school districts spend some additional $4,000 per student per year to combat attention problems and challenges with regard to executive function skills? It’s true. Through implementations such as C8 Sciences’ ACTIVATE™, most executive administrators at schools can afford to introduce the program in their institutions through reasonable per-seat pricing models. The average cost to educate a child in the school district decreases significantly over time as executive functioning skills improve and problems with attention are eliminated or reduced.

For Palm Beach County’s Christa McAuliffe Middle School, positive experiences with the cognitive cross-training program ultimately encouraged students to continue practicing at home – indicating that this increased brain stimulation indeed accelerates growth. This is precisely how ACTIVATE™ is helping ADHD students.