After earning his degree in 1990, he began a post-doctoral fellowship in a clinical neuropsychology at Boston Children's Hospital, Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry.
Children with ADHD have a hard time multitasking, which in an academic setting means that they have difficulty listening to their teacher and taking notes simultaneously.
Mahone believes that it is working memory deficits that inhibit ADHD students from fully comprehending the main points of reading material; children with ADHD tend to get distracted by smaller, less relevant details, which results in their inability to fully comprehend what they read as a whole.
Because of time pressure, tests are especially difficult for children with ADHD, and they are more likely to experience fatigue as a result of their slow processing speed and deficient motor skills.
[3] Mahone's research indicates that children with ADHD function somewhat normally until third grade, because up until then, tasks and assignments are simple and do not require a lot of mental processing.
Mahone believes this shift in mental processing explains why children with ADHD do not start to struggle in school until around third or fourth grade.
This evidence supports his claim that neuropsychological assessments of children suspected to have ADHD are necessary, despite the fact that they are costly and time-consuming.