Working Memory and Learning

A Practical Guide for Teachers

Susan Gathercole, Tracy Packiam Alloway

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781412936125
• eBook ISBN: 9781446200155
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Dr Tracy Alloway has been awarded the prestigious Joseph Lister Award from the British Science Association.

?The authors have written a guide for practitioners that is both highly practical, and yet based upon sound theoretical principles….This book achieves a successful, yet often elusive, link between theory, research and practice, and deserves to have a high readership. I will have no hesitation in recommending it to a range of readers? - Jane Mott, Support for Learning

?This book fulfils its aim to explain working memory and the limits it places on children?s classroom learning. For teachers it gives a very clear guide and fills a gap in understanding that can only lead to more child-centred approaches to teaching and learning? - Lynn Ambler, Support for Learning

?A clear and accessible account of current theory and research, which is then applied to children?s learning in the classroom....The range of strategies...are well grounded in theory derived from research and sit within a coherent conceptual model? - The Psychologist

?An easy to read yet informative book that explains the concepts clearly and offers practitioners ways to support those with poor working memory in the classroom? - SNIP

`The topic of working memory nowadays tends to dominate discussions with teachers and parents, and both groups can helpfully be directed to this easy-to-read but serious text … (it) is likely to prove a turning-point in the management and facilitation of hard-to-teach children. In a situation muddied by ever-multiplying syndromes and disorders, this book delivers a clarifying and reassuring isolation of the major cognitive characteristic that cuts across all the boundaries and leaves the class teacher and SENCO empowered. I think very highly of the book and shall be recommending it steadily? - Martin Turner, Child Center for Evaluation and Teaching, Kuwait

Susan Gathercole is winner of the British Psychological Society?s President?s Award for 2007

A good working memory is crucial to becoming a successful learner, yet there is very little material available in an easy-to-use format that explains the concept and offers practitioners ways to support children with poor working memory in the classroom.

This book provides a coherent overview of the role played by working memory in learning during the school years, and uses theory to inform good practice.

Topics covered include:

- the link between working memory skills and key areas of learning (such as literacy & numeracy)

- the relationship between working memory and children with developmental disorders

- assessment of children for working memory deficits

- strategies for supporting working memory in under-performing children

This accessible guide will help SENCOs, teachers, teaching assistants, speech and language therapists and educational psychologists to understand and address working memory in their setting.

CHAPTER 1

An introduction to working memory

Overview

This chapter provides an introduction to working memory and how it is used in everyday life. It describes the limits of working memory, the causes of loss of information from working memory, and how the components of working memory function. Differences between working memory and other kinds of memory are discussed, and the characteristics of different kinds of long-term memory are outlined.

Introduction

When asked recently to describe what working memory is, a group of teachers working with young children made the following comments.

‘No idea. Never heard of it.’
‘I don’t know, but I have a terrible memory. I can never remember
children’s names, telephone numbers or other pieces of information.’
‘Is it similar to short-term and long-term memory?’

You may be similarly uncertain about what working memory is, and what impact it has on how children function in the classroom. The purpose of this chapter is to answer some of the questions that are often asked about working memory, and to explain how it works. By the end of this chapter, you should be familiar with what working memory is and have a reasonable understanding of its everyday uses. You will also learn how working memory differs from other kinds of memory that retain information for much longer periods of time – hours, days, years and, in some cases, decades. Working memory, in contrast, is useful only for remembering a small amount of information for a matter or seconds, or minutes at most.

What is working memory?

‘Working memory’ is the term used by psychologists to refer to the ability we have to hold and manipulate information in the mind over short periods of time. It provides a mental workspace or jotting pad that is used to store important information in the course of our everyday lives.

One example of an activity that uses working memory is mental arithmetic. Imagine, for example, that you are attempting to multiply together the numbers 43 and 67 in a situation where you are unable to use either a calculator or a pen and paper. To do this, you would first need to store the two numbers in working memory. The next step would be to use the multiplication rules you have already learned to calculate the products of successive pairs of numbers, adding to working memory the products as you go. Finally, you would need to add together the products held in working memory, arriving at a final solution.

This process imposes quite considerable burdens of working memory: several number combinations need to be kept in working memory for the amount of time it takes to make these calculations, and the contents of working memory have to be updated to include our number calculations as we proceed through the stages of the calculation. Without working memory, it would not be possible to carry out this kind of complex mental activity without having some means to make an external record of the numbers and the calculations.

We usually experience mental activities that place significant demands on working memory as a kind of mental juggling in which we try to keep all elements of the task – in the case of mental arithmetic, the original numbers we are trying to multiply as well as the calculations we make as we proceed – going at the same time. Often, the juggling attempt will fail, either because the capacity of working memory is exceeded, or because we become distracted and our attention is diverted away from the task in hand. A minor distraction such as an unrelated thought springing to mind or an interruption by someone else is likely to result in complete loss of the stored information, and so in a failed calculation attempt. As no amount of effort will allow us to remember again the lost information, the only course of action is to start the calculation afresh.

Here are some more examples of everyday activities that depend on working memory.

• Following directions such as ‘When you pass the church on the left, turn immediately right and then take the second left.’
• Hearing an unfamiliar word in a foreign language and attempting to repeat it several seconds later.
• Adding up and remembering the total amount spent as you select items from shelves at the supermarket and add them to your basket.
• Remembering to measure and combine the correct amounts of ingredients (‘rub in 50g of margarine and 100g of flour, then add 75g of sugar’), when the recipe is no longer in view.

Is there a limit to what working memory can hold?

Yes, the amount of information that can be held in working memory for even a short period of time is strictly limited and if this limit is exceeded, we will forget at least some of what we are trying to remember. For example, multiplying larger numbers such as 542 and 891 ‘in our heads’ is for most of us out of the question, even though it does not require greater mathematical knowledge than calculating the product of a pair of two-digit numbers. The reason we cannot do this is simply because it would require the storage of more information than the limited capacity of working memory can hold.

It is often said that the average adult cannot hold more than six or seven units of information in working memory. This is the upper limit, and for some kinds of information such as meaningless patterns the amount we can store in working memory is much less. You will notice that the capacity of working memory is described here in terms of units of information: so, what exactly is a unit? The answer depends on whether the material to be remembered is organised in a meaningful way, or not. A digit in a sequence that comprises a telephone or a PIN number or a single item in a shopping list, all represent single units. However, if the individual elements can be grouped together in a larger chunk, then this chunk becomes a unit. For example, it is difficult to remember nine letters that do not form a spelling pattern such as JDIWMXLPQ, but if we are able to group a sequence of letters of the same length into meaningful units such as BBC-IBM-USA, then remembering nine letters is less of a problem. Similarly, most adults can just about remember a list of about six words such as hat, walk, roof, duck, tree, and banana that are not related to one another in meaning. If, however, the sequence of words forms a meaningful sentence such as When the man walked down the street he saw a red fox crossing the road which consists of more than twice as many words, it is quite easy to remember. In this case, memory for the sentence can be supported not only by working memory, but also by our memory for the meaning of the sentence. Combining these two sources of memory – working memory, and memory for meaning – boosts memory performance dramatically.

Another factor that influences how well a particular piece of information is remembered is its location within a larger sequence of material. Consider attempting to remember a list of words such as hat, walk, roof, duck, tree, banana, car and sun, in this order. Because the list contains eight words (that is, eight units because the material cannot easily be chunked), it is likely to exceed the working memory capacity of most people, resulting in errors. Interestingly, it is quite predictable where the errors are likely to occur: we are most likely to forget items from the middle of the list. Recall of the items at the very beginning of lists is relatively good because we have had more opportunity to rehearse these, and rehearsal boosts recall. This advantage to items at the beginning of a list is known as the primacy effect. Recall is also very accurate for the final items in a sequence, and this is known as the recency effect. It occurs mainly because we do not have to hold the material in working memory for as long. Recall of the final item in a list is particularly accurate if it has been spoken rather than just read – it sometimes seems as though you can hear an echo of the most recent word that has been uttered, and this lingers on for several seconds. As a result, it can be useful to say something aloud rather than reading it silently if you want to recall it a brief time later.

The sound patterns of the words that we are trying to remember can also have an impact on the accuracy with which they are held in working memory. Sequences of words that are distinct such as bus, clock, spoon, fish and mouse are much easier to remember than a list of words that sound very similar such as man, cat, map, mat, can and cap, because we are much less likely to confuse their sounds in working memory.

How much information can be stored in working memory is also affected by background noise. The contents of working memory are best preserved in silence, and are strongly disrupted by hearing speech that is unrelated – this might consist of a conversation by other people in the same room, or may come from the television or radio. It is almost impossible to prevent this kind of material from disrupting the contents of working memory, leading to greater rates of forgetting than in quiet conditions. Constant background noise that does not involve language, such as the hum of a vacuum cleaner or the sound of a lawn mower, has little discernible effect. You may, however, be startled when a noise starts, and this could distract you from attending to the contents of working memory which may then cause accelerated loss of information.

Most of us employ strategies to prolong the period over which information is stored in working memory, even if we are not consciously aware of doing so. One common strategy is to rehearse the contents of working memory; often, this takes the form of repeatedly saying ‘in our heads’ the material to be remembered, until the point at which the information can be used. So, if we are told a new telephone number that we want to dial when we go to the next room to find the phone, it is likely that we will repeat the sequence either silently, in a whisper or out loud, to keep it in mind. One factor that influences the effectiveness of rehearsal in maintaining the contents of working memory is the length of the material being rehearsed. Words that take longer to pronounce, such as refrigerator, hippopotamus, Mississippi, and aluminium, take longer to rehearse and so are less easily maintained than short words such as bus, clock, spoon and fish.

Being aware of your memory strengths and limitations can enable you to deploy compensatory strategies very effectively. When one of the authors was discussing rehearsal recently with a group of teachers, a member of the audience described how both she and her husband had evolved a strategy of sharing their working memory resources when necessary. When they were given lengthy telephone numbers to remember, they would try to remember half of the sequence each, and so combine their working memory capacities. They also were aware that although rehearsing their part of the sequence helped, hearing the other person rehearse aloud was very disruptive, and this led to them establishing a ‘silent rehearsal only’ agreement that would minimise mutual interference and distraction. By being aware of their own personal limits in this way, this couple were able to increase their individual working memory capacities.

Although rehearsal can be extremely useful in these situations, there are other kinds of mental activities that involve working memory for which it is much less appropriate. Mental arithmetic is a good example of this. It involves retrieving our knowledge of number rules and applying this knowledge, as well as storing the numbers to be operated on and any interim numbers already generated, and rehearsing the numbers has the unfortunate consequence of disturbing the mental activity of making the calculations. Rehearsal is therefore a strategy that is most effective when the current activity involves only storage, as in the case of remembering a new telephone number. When it is necessary to engage in other demanding mental activities as well as storing information in working memory, rehearsal is much less useful.

Other strategies that people develop across time to cope with the limits to working memory are often idiosyncratic, and play to their individual mental strengths. For example, some people have extremely good abilities to generate mental images of information and of remembering these for quite long periods of time. Instead of writing down a shopping list, these individuals may imagine and remember a route through their local supermarket in which they stop at particular locations in the aisles at which they can retrieve each item. This uses long-term memory, so that they will be able to recollect the route several hours later when they arrive in the supermarket, rather than short-term memory. Other people have from an early age remarkable abilities to remember information such as numbers in terms of colours or other sensations that they strongly associate them with (an ability known as synaesthesia), and this for them provides a highly effective way of remembering. However, most of us cannot do this.

Sometimes we hear of individuals who have exceptional abilities to remember huge amounts of meaningless information, and may indeed have made a career on this basis. For example, cases have been reported of people who can remember sequences of more than 100 digits in their original sequence. Do they have working memory capacities that are ten times or more greater than our own? Rather surprisingly, it appears not. What distinguishes such individuals from the rest of us is that they have developed and practised highly systematic and elaborate strategies that support their memory without relying on the rather limited working memory system. For example, one mnemonist was also an accomplished athlete, and would remember runs of numbers within the larger sequence in terms of the fastest times for races of various distances over famous routes. This is a good example of the use of chunking, described in an earlier section, as a way of decreasing working memory load and exploiting knowledge that has already been learned and organised into chunks. In situations in which their highly developed strategies are not appropriate, mnemonists typically show evidence of good but by no means exceptional working memory capacities. It is therefore clear that their undoubted memory strengths come from the strategies they have developed that exploit existing knowledge, reducing the dependence on working memory.

Does working memory capacity vary between people?

Yes, there is a personal limit to working memory, with each individual having a relatively fixed capacity that may be greater or lesser than that of others. This capacity is largely consistent over different occasions, although the other factors affecting working memory that were discussed in the section above will influence memory accuracy on particular occasions. Because of the substantial variation in working memory capacity found between individuals, it is necessary when interacting with others to bear in mind that their working memory capacities may not be the same as ours, and for this reason we may have to modify how we pass on information to them – how much information, and at what rate. As we will see later in the book, this is an important consideration for an adult working with young children, as their working memories are even more limited in capacity than those of older children and adults.

What causes information to be lost from working memory?

Because working memory capacity is limited, it can easily fail us. Typically, information in working memory is lost very quickly, within a few seconds. The contents can be lost either because our attention is distracted from it so that it fades very rapidly, or it is displaced by other information. The loss of information from working memory can to some extent be prevented by maintaining attention on it, an experience that literally feels like holding something in mind. Here are some of the situations that lead to the loss of the contents of working memory.

• Distraction. An unrelated thought springing to mind, an interruption by someone else, or another distraction within the environment such as a telephone ringing or a child crying is often sufficient to cause information to be lost from working memory. This is because unless we continue to attend to the contents of working memory, the stored information decays very rapidly and is soon lost for good. It is therefore very important to minimise likely distractions if we ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the authors
• Preface
• 1 An introduction to working memory
• 2 Working memory in childhood
• 3 Working memory and learning
• 4 Children with poor working memory
• 5 Classroom support for children with poor working memory
• 6 Putting the intervention into practice
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index