Working Memory Weakness and Strategies

Working memory is a place where ideas, facts and procedures can be held temporarily while the student uses and manipulates the information for a project, assignment or solves a problem. Working memory is longer than short-term memory and can be viewed as a place, with limited space, where short-term memory and long-term memory meet.

Children use working memory when they need to hold information for doing an activity long enough to complete the activity. The ability to hold new information while doing a learning task is expected of children in school multiple times a day. A weakness in working memory can affect a child’s performance, motivation to perform and ultimately, his/her self-esteem. However, an understanding of your child’s specific learning strengths and weaknesses, and strategies that s/he can use to work around this challenge area can help reduce frustration, confusion and anxiety, and can increase performance and self efficacy.
Children who struggle with working memory often forget part of a task while they are working on a task. It can appear that a child simply did not follow directions, or is not motivated to do a task while the true difficulty is a weakness in working memory. In math, this child may lose his/her place often and may forget basic procedures.

Organizing a writing assignment or oral answer while speaking or writing an answer may be a challenge.Failure to spell words correctly even after passing a recent spelling test, forgetting learned grammar and mechanical rules while working on an essay and/or poor reading comprehension are also indicators of possible working memory weakness.

A child with poor working memory can spend a long time on an assignment and still not be as productive as his/her classmates. It can appear that the child is simply not paying attention to directions, or is not staying on task. The child may or may not appear confused.

Following are some strategies than may help a student with a weakness in working memory to improve this learning area. It is usually best to try one or two strategies at a time. Some strategies may be more successful than others, depending on the child and the learning task.

• Young children should spend extra time practicing letter formation so that they do not need to think about how to form individual letters while working to compose sentences.
• For children with a weak working memory, it is helpful to learn, re-learn and practice basic math facts. Young children benefit from learning basic math facts. If basic facts are automatic, the child can focus more effort on following procedures and problem-solving.
• Encourage and allow your child to to write out all of the steps to a math problem to avoid losing their place. Rally the support of your child’s teacher to allow him/her to reley on memorized mental calculations less that others.
• Memorizing sight words while learning stretegies to decode words, will allow a child to direct more effort into reading.
• Learning and relearning specific strategies for decoding new words, especially multi-syllabic words can be helpful.
• If a child’s working memory is limited, compared to others, s/he can learn ways to make the information needed visible and available for manipulation and later use.
• As your child progresses in school, teach him/her to be active while reading, to underline important facts and details while reading simple directions or while reading one or more paragraphs for comprehension. Buying an extra set of textbooks for this purpose, or photocopying shorter assignments can be a worthwhile investment.
• Jotting ideas, facts and notes on Post-it notes and learning to highlight and color code new information can be helpful. These children can/should learn to highlight and circle key information and to color code important information with markers and use Post-it notes often.

As children with a limited working memory grow older and work becomes more complex, graphic organizers, calculators, an electronic dictionary, portable keyboard, word processor with spell-check and/or digital audio recorder/recordings and support with using these strategies and devices can enable a child to be achieve more succes, higher quality/more sophisticated work and increased productivity.