Underachieving Kids May Have Poor Working Memory

Don’t assume that your underachieving students aren’t bright. They may just have poor working memory, say researchers who have produced a tool to assess kids’ memory capacity in the classroom.

Durham University researchers in the United Kingdom who surveyed more than 3,000 children found that 10 percent of kids across all age groups suffer from poor working memory that seriously affects their learning. Nationally, this equals almost half a million children in primary schools alone who are affected by this problem.

Working memory is the ability to retain information and manipulate it mentally. It’s used, for example, when adding two numbers in your head without using a pen and paper or a calculator. 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.

Unfortunately, many teachers aren’t aware of this problem and often end up labeling children with this problem as inattentive or as having lower levels of intelligence.

"Currently, children are not identified and assessed for working memory within a classroom setting,” says lead researcher on the study Tracy Alloway from Durham University's School of Education. “Early identification of these children will be a major step toward addressing underachievement. It will mean teachers can adapt their methods to help the children's learning before they fall too far behind their peers."

The good news is that various large-scale studies by Alloway and her colleagues show that children with poor memories can go on to achieve academic success if they’re taught how to learn despite their smaller capacity to store information mentally.

"Working memory is a bit like a mental jotting pad, and how good this is in someone will either ease their path to learning or seriously prevent them from learning,” Alloway says.

To help the problem, Alloway and her colleagues have developed new tools, a combination of a checklist and computer program, designed to help kids with poor memories and help teachers assess their students’ memory capacity from as early as four years old. This early assessment will enable teachers to adopt new approaches to teaching and take preemptive measures to address the problem of underachievement in schools.

Without appropriate intervention, poor working memory in children, which is thought to be genetic, can affect long-term academic success into adulthood and prevent children from achieving their potential, say the researchers.

One tool, called the Working Memory Rating Scale, allows teachers to identify children who may have a problem with working memory without immediately subjecting them to further testing. A high score indicates that a child is likely to have working memory problems that may affect his or her academic progress. Another tool is the computerized Automated Working Memory Assessment.

Both tools, available from Pearson Assessment, suggest ways for teachers to manage kids’ working memory loads through repetition of instructions; talking in simple, short sentences; and breaking down tasks into smaller chunks of information.

The tools were successfully piloted in 35 schools across the United Kingdom and have been translated into 10 foreign languages.