What are the areas of professional practice that capture my interest? With regard to the general topic, what would be an essential question for me be? What do I really know about this topic? What don’t I know about this topic?

It is really hard to pick a specific area that captures my interest because I find everything so fascinating. I think it would be much easier to pick an area that doesn’t interest me, but that isn’t the question, is it. I really enjoy areas about development. I know that really narrows things down. I like to see the commonalities among normal developing children then pinpointing an area in a disordered child that isn’t developing as well. I guess I like the investigative stuff. Language disorders have always fascinated me. I don’t know why because everyone else in CD seems to hate the language classes. In addition, we haven’t really gotten into a lot of the different types of language disorders. But, as far as the normal language development goes, it just makes sense to me. After I learn something new in a language development class, I think the information falls into a common sense category. It’s like I think that I should have known the information if I would have thought about it before hand. Another area of professional development that is really beginning to interest me is Auditory Processing Disorders. This fascination began when I attended a meeting about it at WVSHA. It was so interesting when they talked about how different a normal developing brain works from the brain of someone with an Auditory Processing Disorder. The problem is that I do not know a lot of information about Auditory Processing Disorders. I know that people with APD cannot process information as quickly because their neurons are not firing as fast. I also know that there is a controversial therapy program called FAST FORWARD that attempts to increase the speed at which the neurons fire. In our online meeting yesterday, Mary and I were discussing weather APD was a learning disorder or not. I mentioned that I thought that it is or should be considered a learning disorder because these children cannot learn as fast because of the slow firing of neurons. Neither one of us knew exactly how APD is considered in the school system. Lekei helped to give me an idea for a research question. She said that I should try to find information about how many children with APD are diagnosed with ADD. This seemed like a good question because children with APD get active or lose interest in something because they do not understand the information. There is little that I know and a lot that I don’t know about APD, but it really interests me so I thought that I would take Lekei’s suggestion about my research question. I want to know more about APD and Lekei’s suggestion seems like it will be interesting and fun to learn about. Therefore, my essential question is: How often are children with Auditory Processing Disorders misdiagnosed with ADD?

Question: How often are Children with APD misdiagnosed with ADD?