Experimental Evaluation of the Impact of Lived Experience and Personal Story on Neuroscience Knowledge Translation Effectiveness: Sharing the Neuroscience of ADHD with Pre-Service Teachers

Previous work suggested that sharing personal stories is effective for knowledge translation (KT) of the neuroscience of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for a teacher audience. In the current study, we experimentally evaluated the impact of personal story and lived experience on a similar KT activity. We measured knowledge and attitudes about ADHD before and after our KT activity and used a factorial design to evaluate the impact of personal story (personalized versus depersonalized) and lived experience (presenter with versus without an ADHD diagnosis) with N = 14 to 24 per group. The presenter without an ADHD diagnosis was a neuroscience expert. All conditions were associated with increased attribution of ADHD symptoms to the brain. Speaker quality ratings were high, especially in the personalized + ADHD diagnosis condition and the depersonalized + no ADHD diagnosis condition. While incorporating lived experience is important for authentic KT, we demonstrated that the KT presenter themselves need not have lived experience to change pre-service teacher attitudes and beliefs. More work is needed to address the potential impacts of neuroscience expertise and other aspects of the presenters in our study.