Ask the EP | How do I Support Children's Working Memory?

As Educational Psychologists we often support teachers to develop children's executive functioning skills.

Despite being a significant predictor of academic achievement, Working Memory is often overlooked which means that school staff aren’t always sure how to help children when they experience difficulties in this area. Working memory difficulties are also often mistaken for other problems such as attention difficulties, lack of motivation or emotional needs.

In this blog, Dr Lee Randall will be sharing his knowledge of Working Memory, discussing what it is, how to spot when children are struggling with working memory and providing ideas about how we can help children who require support for their working memory.

What to do when children are struggling with their Working Memory

What is Working Memory?

Working memory is a term used by psychologists to refer to the ability we have to hold, process and manipulate information in our minds for short periods of time. It provides a mental workspace to store & work with important information vital to the course of our everyday lives. This information can come from our environment or our Long Term Memory (i.e. information we have stored in our minds from past experiences).

Often our working memory uses information from both the environment & long term memory in order to help us complete tasks and solve problems. For example, when we are adding up the cost of grocery items when out shopping as we go along, we are using information from the environment (i.e. the price of the items) knowledge from long term memory (i.e. knowledge of maths and money) and combining them in our working memory to complete the task.

Working memory is made up of a number of different components and has some quite technical ways in which it works. However from an educators point of view, how working memory functions is not all that important, (though for those of you who are interested in this I would direct you to this page on Simply Psychology). What is important is understanding why working memory is important for learning, how to tell when children may be struggling with working memory and what to do about it!

Why is Working Memory important for learning?

Working memory is vital for learning because it is vital for so many of the important components of learning. In particular, working memory is required in order for us to work with and manipulate information mentally in order to comprehend what we are told, solve problems, learn new concepts, facts and skills and encode strong memories that are easily retrievable when we need them. It is no stretch to say then that working memory is as vital a component of the learning process as any other cognitive function.

This is why, when children have difficulties with working memory, they can encounter significant difficulties with learning. Research has shown a very strong link between Working Memory capacity & achievement in the National Curriculum. Gathercole et al (2004) looked at Working Memory scores amongst 3 groups of 7 year old children classed as below average, average & above average in Maths & English based on their performances on national curriculum tests. The results demonstrated that Working Memory was very strongly associated with national curriculum levels as demonstrated in the chart below:

As such, it is vital that we are able to identify and support children who are struggling with their working memory…

How do I know if a child is struggling with Working Memory?

In my job I often hear that children are ‘struggling to follow instructions’, ‘losing their way halfway through a task’ or, ‘struggling to retain learning’. Whilst there can often be a number of factors contributing to these issues, working memory is something that comes up again and again in cases where children present with such difficulties. So, if you find that children are struggling with some of the following things in class, it might be worth asking yourself whether this child has some difficulties with working memory:

• Struggling to engage in learning contexts (whole class, group and independent work) despite engaging well in other areas (e.g. socially).
• Struggling to keep up with the pace of teaching.
• Requires instructions to be repeated often or follows instructions incorrectly.
• Requires repeated exposures to new learning before it sinks in.
• Seeming to know something one day and forget it the next.
• Starts tasks enthusiastically but easily loses their way.

What can I do to help a child struggling with working memory?

The first thing to say is that strategies that work for children with working memory difficulties, will often also support the learning of other children so integrating some of these strategies into daily teaching practice will certainly do no harm. There are of course many different strategies one could employ to support working memory in the classroom, as such, below I will outline just five that are straightforward to implement and impactful to ensure you are making the most of your time spent putting these strategies into practice.

1. Evaluate the working memory load of your tasks – Tasks and instructions that are long, unfamiliar or complex load much more heavily on working memory. As such, try to intersperse such tasks with more familiar, simple or short ones to allow children some mental breathing space.
2. Encourage use of memory aids - Children with poor Working Memory often find it difficult to retrieve previously learned information from long term memory when engaged in a cognitively demanding task. Memory aids such as lesson objective prompt sheets, word walls, hundred squares or spellings for newly learned words can help the child to put information together in their Working Memory more easily, enabling them to better engage with complex tasks.
3. Repeat important information - It is important to remember that children with poor Working Memory differ in their needs for repetition in comparison to their peers, so this needs to be tailored to suit them. Checking in after whole class input to ensure they have understood the input and task instructions is vital for these children!
4. Support to request help - Children with poor Working Memory are generally not as good at asking for help as their peers for a number of reasons; they may not want to feel like they are always asking for help or they may simply forget to ask for help and drift off task. A subtle system such as a traffic light cone strategy (they have red amber and green upturned cups on their desk and display green if they do not need help, amber if they are struggling a little and red if they are really stuck) can help in this regard after they are given a little coaching and encouragement to use it.
5. Working Memory games – There are lots of different memory games you can play, buy and find online that help with working memory, here is an example of just two to get you going…
   1. Copy Me [Silent Robot]! Here, the adult performs a series of increasingly difficult actions which the child has to copy (e.g. tap nose; tap nose & hop; tap nose, hop, fold arms etc.). The child should wait until you have finished before copying the sequence of movements.
   2. Treasure Hunt. Here, the child can be given a verbal ‘treasure list’ of items to collect from another classroom, room in the house or other area (e.g. “get me a X and an X”). Before they go, it is important that you ask them to repeat back the list of items they have to get, and encourage the child to keep saying these words as they go. See how many they can get in 5 minutes (2+ items at a time).