Anthea Lipsett
Education Guardian,
Thursday 28 February 2008
Children who under-achieve at school may just have a poor working memory rather than low intelligence, according to researchers who have produced the world's first tool to assess memory capacity in the classroom.
The researchers from Durham University surveyed more than 3,000 primary school children of all ages and found that 10% of them suffer from poor working memory, which seriously impedes their learning.
Nationally, this equates to almost 500,000 children in primary education being affected.
But the researchers found that teachers rarely identify a poor working memory and often describe children with this problem as inattentive or less intelligent.
Working memory is the ability to hold information in your head and manipulate it mentally - for example adding up two numbers spoken to you by someone else without using pen and paper or a calculator, or memorising verbal directions.
Children at school need this memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks, such as following teachers' instructions or remembering sentences they have been asked to write down.
The new tool - a combination of a checklist and computer programme - will enable teachers to identify and assess children's memory capacity in the classroom from as early as four-years-old.
This should allow teachers to adopt new approaches to teaching children with poor memories, which in turn would help address the problem of under-achievement in schools.
Without appropriate intervention, poor working memory in children, which is thought to be genetic, can affect long-term academic success and prevent children from achieving their potential, the academics warned.
Although the tools have already been piloted successfully in 35 schools across the UK and have been translated into 10 languages, this is the first time they have been made widely available.
Lead researcher Dr Tracy Alloway, from Durham's school of education, told EducationGuardian.co.uk: "The concept of working memory is relatively new compared with IQ and only in the last 15 years have we been interested in the link between it and learning.
"It is a much more important predictor of learning than IQ because it measures a child's potential to learn rather than having any link to environment or socio-economic background, which are closely linked to IQ."
Teachers tend to identify children with poor working memories as having attention problems or "dreamers", she said, but the new test will allow them to screen children for the disorder.
"The only way children with poor working memory can go on to achieving academic success is by teaching them how to learn despite their smaller capacity to store information mentally," she said.
The checklist, called the Working Memory Rating Scale (WMRS), will enable teachers to identify children who they think may have a problem with working memory without immediately subjecting them to a test. A high score on this checklist shows that a child is likely to have memory problems that will affect their academic progress.
If the teacher feels significantly concerned about a child's performance in class, they can get the child to do the computerised Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA).
The tools also suggest ways for teachers to manage the children's working memory loads, which will minimise the chances of children failing to complete tasks. Examples include repeating instructions, talking in simple short sentences and breaking down tasks into smaller chunks of information.
Chris Evans, the headteacher of Lakes primary school in Redcar, Cleveland, who has been working with Alloway, said: "With some of the staff now trained to identify problems, we have the knowledge and tools to carry out a proper assessment and have the skills to help these children be more successful in school.
"We are already beginning to see children in a different light knowing more about the difficulties faced by children with impaired working memory. We realise that they are not daydreamers, inattentive or underachieving, but children who simply need a different approach.
"We think these new ways of learning can help both the teacher and the children to successfully complete their work."
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Article retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/feb/28/schools.uk%20%3Chttp://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/feb/28/schools.uk
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