Attention issues or working memory issues?
At this week’s Resilience Club we were talking about the challenges associated with poor working memory. Working memory is the part of our memory that temporarily stores information while we are using it to complete a task. For example, it is how we can work out 253 x 2 in our heads – we hold both numbers in our memory and do the calculation. It is how we remember a 3-step set of instructions, set the table, make yourself a drink and wash your hands before dinner.
The analogy often used is that working memory is like the RAM memory in a computer. If you buy a computer with 16GB of RAM it can cope with you having multiple applications working and still be able to process things at a reasonable speed whereas one with only 8 GB or 4 GB of RAM might struggle with multiple applications or do things very slowly. It is not the same as the space on the hard drive – which is the computer’s equivalent of long term memory. Working memory also varies across the full IQ spectrum, so you could have a super-fast Pentium processor that can’t deliver what you need due to a lack of RAM.
It is commonly accepted that children have smaller working memories than adults and that some people have even smaller working memories than their peers. It is estimated that 10-15% of children suffer from poor working memory to the extent that it affects their ability to learn within a school.
A child with poor working memory is more likely to be described as having attention problems than having memory problems. You might think ‘it goes in one ear and out of the other’ or ‘they don’t listen to a word I say.’ Whilst that may be true, they may also be suffering from working memory overload. Poor working memory is now widely associated with underperformance in maths and English.
Working memory is often tested as part of an educational psychology assessment or a dyslexia assessment. These assessments are expensive and may not always be appropriate. However, these days working memory can be tested through a computer-based assessment such as Working Memory Test Battery for Children (Pickering & Gathercole, 2001) or the Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA: Alloway, 2007). These assessments are available to schools and in my opinion, every school should have the capacity to routinely administer these tests, as, statistically 10-15% of their students will be affected.
I first came across the concept of working memory, in the context of poor working memory over a decade ago, and at the time the conventional thinking was it needed to be supported, and there wasn’t much that could be done about the underlying capacity.
However, Tuesday’s conversation challenged me to update my knowledge in this area. When I sat down to write this article, I was going to talk about how working memory training programmes, whilst they have been shown to improve working memory, do so only on tasks that are similar to the ones trained, in effect the benefits are not transferrable to other tasks.
However, it seems in the last decade science has moved on, and there appears to now be substantial evidence that working memory training programmes do generate improvements in working memory that is transferrable.
One of the companies operating in this space is https://www.cogmed.com/. For full transparency I have no personal experience of this particular company, its methods or the results, however, I am encouraged that this is an area attracting not only scientific research but potentially viable solutions.
If you have a child with diagnosed working memory challenges, I suggest you look further into the strategies for supporting and developing working memory and have a chat with your child’s school.
Some useful resources in this area include:
Working Memory & Learning – a practical guide for teachers
Child Mind Institute – How to help kids with working memory issues
