Psychologists use the term ‘working memory’ to describe the ability we have to hold in mind and mentally manipulate information over short periods of time. Working memory is often thought of as a mental workspace that we can use to store important information in the course of our mental activities. A good example of an activity that uses working memory is mental arithmetic. Imagine, for example, attempting to multiply 43 and 27 together, and spoken to you by another person, without being able to use a pen and paper or a calculator. First of all, you would need to hold the two numbers in working memory. The next step would be to use learned multiplication rules to calculate the products of successive pairs of numbers, adding to working memory the new products as you proceed. Finally, you would need to add together the products held in working memory, resulting in the correct solution. Without working memory we would not be able to carry out this kind of complex mental activity in which we have to both keep in mind some information while processing other material.
▶ Many of the learning activities that children are engaged with in the classroom, whether related to reading, mathematics, science, or other areas of the curriculum, impose quite considerable burdens on working memory
▶ Poor working memory makes it difficult to complete complex, multi-stage tasks
▶ Poor working memory makes it difficult to follow lengthy instructions
▶ Students with poor working memory frequently lose their place in complicated tasks that they may eventually abandon
▶ Students with poor working memory typically make poor academic progress during the school years, particularly in the areas of reading and mathematics
Poor working memory capacity is characteristic of children with many kinds of learning difficulties. These include individuals with language impairments, with difficulties in reading and mathematics (including dyslexia), with some forms of ADHD and with developmental coordination disorder. Approximately 70% of children with learning difficulties in reading obtain very low scores on tests of working memory that are rare in children with no special educational needs. Not all children with special educational needs have working memory problems. Individuals with problems in areas that are not directly related to learning, such as emotional and behavioural disturbances, typically have working memory capacities that are appropriate for their ages.
Working memory failures typically manifest themselves in frequent errors of the following kinds:
• incomplete recall, such as forgetting some or all of the words in a sentence, or of a sequence of words.
• failing to follow instructions, including remembering only the part of a sequence of instructions, or forgetting the content of an instruction (for example, the child correctly remembers to go to Mrs Smith’s classroom as instructed by the teacher, but once there cannot remember the content of the message to be given)
• place-keeping errors – for example, repeating and/or skipping letters and words during sentence writing, missing out large chunks of a task
• task abandonment – the child gives up a task completely.
It is important to monitor the child’s working memory regularly in the course of demanding activities. This will include:
• looking for warning signs of memory overload;
• ask the child directly – for example, ask for details of what s/he is doing and intends to do next.
In cases when the child has forgotten crucial information:
• repeat information as required;
• break down tasks and instructions into smaller components to minimise memory load;
• encourage the child to request information when required.
Activities that impose heavy storage demands typically involve the retention of significant amounts of verbal material with a relatively arbitrary content.
Some examples of activities with working memory demands that are likely to exceed the capacities of a child with working memory deficits include:
• remembering sequences of three or more numbers or unrelated words (e.g. 5, 9, 2, 6 or cat, lion, kangaroo);
• remembering and successfully following lengthy instructions (e.g. Put your sheets on the green table, arrow cards in the packet, put your pencil away, and come and sit on the carpet);
• remembering lengthy sentences containing some arbitrary content to be written down (e.g. To blow up parliament, Guy Fawkes had 36 barrels of gunpowder);
• keeping track of the place reached in the course of multi-level tasks (e.g. writing a sentence down either from memory or from the white board).
In order to avoid working-memory-related failures, working memory loads in structured activities should be decreased. This can be achieved in a number of ways, including:
• reducing the overall amount of material to be stored (e.g. shortening sentences to be written or number of items to be remembered)
• increasing the meaningfulness and degree of familiarity of the material to be remembered
• simplifying the linguistic structures of verbal material (e.g. using simple active constructions rather than passive forms with embedded clauses in activities involving remembering sentences, and in instructions)
• reducing processing demands
• re-structuring multi-step tasks into separate independent steps, supported by memory aids if possible
• making available and encouraging the use of external devices that act as memory aids for the child; these include ‘useful spellings’ on white boards and cards, providing number lines, printed notes, and dictaphones to store information that needs to be remembered
