Recognising working memory difficulties

 

One of the main difficulties that dyslexic people have is with their working memory. This difficulty is also common to many learning difficulties.

Memory is very complex and has many facets.  A person can have a very good memory for facts but may struggle to learn and recall  their times tables. Someone can have an excellent memory for events that happen on holiday but may not be able to remember the names 2-D shapes.

Working memory is a very specific part of our memory but it has a huge impact on how well a child can function in the classroom as well as in everyday life. Research suggests that working memory is the main predictor of 'learning success' in school and later life.

Working memory is sometimes referred to as our brain's note pad. It is where we keep someone's phone number just long enough to write it down or we store one number while adding another number on. We may not realise it, but we actually use our working memory a lot all through the day.

Here are just a few of the tasks that rely on working memory:

• listening to instructions
• remembering what you want to write while you write it down
• remembering the whole of a sentence that you have read
• remembering the sequence needed for a task or calculation
• learning number bonds and times tables
• learning the spelling high frequency words
• storing facts and information in long term memory

Our working memory is limited and varies from child to child.
Many teachers do not realise that within their classes they may have children with a working memory span of 3 seconds and at the top end a memory span of 12 seconds or more. These children can not and will not respond to classroom tasks in the same way.

Working memory difficulties can be an 'invisible' problem in many classrooms.  

For those with a limited working memory, it can have huge impact on how they process verbal information, work through multi-step tasks and remember what was taught on one day for another day.
It can make routine tasks both difficult and laborious. 

Many people are also unaware of the impact it can have on storing ideas and facts into the long term memory.  In order to put information in our long term memory we need to be able to keep it in our working memory long enough to encode it and store it with other related information.  We have to be able to give the information 'meaning' to be able to store it. Otherwise the information is lost or stored in the 'wrong' place so that it can not be retrieved. This is one of the reasons that an interesting fact which can quickly be linked to prior knowledge will be remembered, where as the 3 times table, which can seem to be meaningless string of numbers, can not be recalled. 

As an observer of many classes and lessons I find it interesting that many teachers never really change their delivery of lessons.  Despite the fact that some children never know what to do after the teacher's introduction or can not remember their number bonds despite practicing them. The teacher continues to explain and teach things in the same way day after day.

The child is blamed for not listening or not remembering when they are actually not able to. 

These children can be very puzzling and frustrating for teachers as they can verbally seem to be intelligent, they may have good general knowledge or vocabulary. They may be good at making links between concepts or have good visual spatial skills. But it often seems to be the 'basics' that they struggle with.

The trouble with working memory is that when it is overloaded there is no way of retrieving the lost information. Teachers and parents need to identify when this happens and look for ways to support the child effectively.

The signs to look out for are:

• Missing words when writing a sentence
• Not punctuating correctly
• Losing place when reading
• Poor reading comprehension 
• Not being able to do mental calculations
• Appearing distracted when someone is talking
• Not following a conversation involving several people
• Losing track of a task and missing or repeating steps
• Forgetting messages or instructions
• Not being able to 'rote' learn

While there are number of well known programmes which address working memory skills like Cogmed and Jungle Memory, in my experience it is more effective to teach compensatory strategies. I will discuss these further in a future article.