A Study to Remember

Don’t assume that your underachieving students aren’t bright. They may just have poor working memory, say British researchers.

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.

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

Working memory is the ability to retain information and manipulate it mentally. It’s used, for example, when adding two numbers in your head.

“Currently, children are not identified and assessed for working memory within a classroom setting,” says lead researcher Tracy Alloway of 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 lower 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.