Organizational Skills Training

This OpenNeuro release (ds006905) holds the MRI of a clinical trial at NYU Langone Health that tested whether Organizational Skills Training (OST), a behavioral program for children who struggle to track assignments, manage materials and plan tasks, changes functional brain connectivity. Children were scanned at baseline and again after the 10-week intervention, or after a matched waiting period in the control arm. The trial ran in two phases, an open single-arm phase and a randomized waitlist-controlled phase (NCT03148782 and NCT04108273). The data are shared under a CC0 waiver.

Composition

The release covers 84 children: 30 from the open phase and 54 from the randomized phase, each with complete data for at least one viewing condition. The participants table lists 30 girls and 54 boys aged 7 to 11 years, with 57 children in the treatment arm and 27 on the waitlist. All had deficient organizational skills on the parent-rated Children's Organizational Skills Scale (COSS-P) in the context of neurodevelopmental disorders; 73 are coded as having ADHD. The table also gives COSS parent and child scores before and after the intervention, IQ, two language scores and free-text diagnoses.

Acquisition

All scans were acquired on a Siemens 3T Prisma with a 32-channel head coil after mock-scanner practice. Each session has a 0.8 mm isotropic MPRAGE with prospective motion correction from the ABCD protocol and up to three 7-minute BOLD runs (TR 800 ms, 2.4 mm voxels): fixation on a cross, cartoon film clips, and the Inscapes abstract animation. EPI fieldmaps are included for part of the runs.

Known limitations

• Single site and scanner, and a modest sample.
• Not every child has all three viewing conditions in both sessions; there are 469 BOLD runs out of a possible 504.
• The authors note that fieldmaps are missing for several functional runs and refer users to the NIMH Data Archive copy for correct files.
• Ages are given in whole years. One child is listed as 7 although the stated inclusion range is 8 to 12 years.
• The ADHD column is coded Y or N with a presentation letter and is not described in a sidecar file.
• The linked paper analyses a subset of 46 children from the randomized phase, so its demographics differ from the release.