INCUP Strategies, Part 2: Challenge
What's the right level of difficulty and why does it matter?
Challenge
People with ADHD crave a good challenge. Find ways to get your fix, such as puzzles or crosswords (a favorite of mine lately), a new interest or hobby, or balancing a tight schedule. But finding things too hard, or too easy, for anyone, can cause motivation to evaporate.
Too Hard
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is useful to consider in this context.1 Any tasks that are too difficult to accomplish, with support, lead to attention withering. These tasks are frustrating, angering, stressful and build a toxic relationship with accomplishing tasks.
Take, for example, fidgety students, trying to sit still in the classroom. The experience of trying to, of getting chided constantly for failing to, is frustrating and embarrassing. This can lead to students resenting or even fearing school.
But finding things too hard, or too easy, can cause motivation to evaporate.
Too Easy
Tasks can’t be too easy, either, if you’re hoping to maintain the attention and motivation of an ADHDer. They’re boring, trifling matters. We’ve all played video games that are too easy; how quickly we shut them off and do something else.
Concluding Notes
Concerning schooling, teachers can have a hard time parsing what a student is experiencing—is the work too easy or too hard?—from the other. So can students. While the cry is all too common that students goof off because they aren’t feeling challenged enough, the opposite can still be true. Students can often lose self-awareness and have little sense how they are performing on assignments relative to expectations. They might think the work is too easy, when they haven’t done half of it!
Parents, listen to your kids about how their work is going. But listen also to teachers. Only together, students, parents and teachers, can the right levels of challenge be found.
Ness, I.J. (2020). Zone of Proximal Development. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_60-1