Working Memory

What is working memory?

Psychologists use the term ‘working memory’ to describe the ability we have to hold in mind and mentally manipulate information over short periods of time. Working memory is often thought of as a mental workspace that we can use to store important information in the course of our mental activities. A good example of an activity that uses working memory is mental arithmetic. Imagine, for example, attempting to multiply 43 and 27 together, and spoken to you by another person, without being able to use a pen and paper or a calculator. First of all, you would need to hold the two numbers in working memory. The next step would be to use learned multiplication rules to calculate the products of successive pairs of numbers, adding to working memory the new products as you proceed. Finally, you would need to add together the products held in working memory, resulting in the correct solution. Without working memory we would not be able to carry out this kind of complex mental activity in which we have to both keep in mind some information while processing other material.

When do we use working memory?

Mental arithmetic is just one example of an activity that relies on working memory. Other examples from everyday life include:

• remembering a new telephone number, a PIN number, web address or a vehicle registration number while we are trying to find a pen and paper to write it down or to use it in some other way

• following spoken directions such as ‘Go straight over at the roundabout, take the second left and the building is on the right opposite the church’

• calculating how much the bill will be at the supermarket checkout for the items we have in our basket

• remembering the unfamiliar foreign name of a person who has just been introduced to you for long enough to enable you to introduce them to someone else

• measuring and combining the correct amounts of ingredients (e.g. rub in 50g of margarine and 100g of flour, and then add 75g of sugar) when you have just read the recipe but are no longer looking at the page.

You may notice from these examples that we typically use working memory as a sort of mental jotting pad in situations when there is no other external record such as written notes or a calculator.

Why is working memory important in classroom learning?

Many of the learning activities that children are engaged with in the classroom, whether related to reading, mathematics, science, or other areas of the curriculum, impose quite considerable burdens on working memory. Activities often require the child to hold in mind some information (for example, a sentence to be written down) while doing something that for them is mentally challenging (such as spelling the individual words in the sentence). These are the kinds of activities on which children with poor working memory struggle with most, and often fail to complete them properly because they have lost from working memory the crucial information needed to guide their actions. As a result, the children may not get the learning benefit of successfully completing an activity, and this slows down their rates of learning.

Children with poor working memory also have problems following lengthy instructions to do one thing after another, because they forget the instruction before the whole sequence of actions has been completed. As a consequence, the child will often not engage properly with the normal pace of ongoing classroom activities. Often it appears that the child has not paid attention, when in fact they have simply forgotten what it is that they have to do.

Working memory is also needed to help us remember where we have got to in a complicated mental activity. Consider the case of a child with low working memory capacity attempting to follow the teacher’s instructions to write down a sentence she has just spoken. The child not only needs to hold the sentence in working memory for sufficiently long to guide his or her attempts to write the individual words, but needs to remember how far they have got in this attempt, and to find the next word in working memory. Although to skilled writers this seems like an easy task, children with poor working memory capacities find this extremely difficult, and often either skip or repeat words and letters as they lose their place in this demanding mental activity.

Characteristics of children with poor working memory

Typically, children with poor working memory:

• are well-adjusted socially

• are reserved in group activities in the classroom, rarely volunteering answers and sometimes not answering direct questions

• behave as though they have not paid attention, for example forgetting part or all of instructions or messages, or not seeing tasks through to completion

• frequently lose their place in complicated tasks that they may eventually abandon

• forget the content of messages and instructions

• make poor academic progress during the school years, particularly in the areas of reading and mathematics

• are considered by their teachers to have short attention spans and also to be easily distracted.

Working memory and learning difficulties

Poor working memory capacity is characteristic of children with many kinds of learning difficulties. These include individuals with language impairments, with difficulties in reading and mathematics (including dyslexia), with some forms of ADHD and with developmental coordination disorder. Approximately 70% of children with learning difficulties in reading obtain very low scores on tests of working memory that are rare in children with no special educational needs. Not all children with special educational needs have working memory problems. Individuals with problems in areas that are not directly related to learning, such as emotional and behavioural disturbances, typically have working memory capacities that are appropriate for their ages.

Why is working memory crucial for learning? 

Working memory is important because it provides a mental workspace in which we can hold information whilst mentally engaged in other relevant activities. The capacity to do this is crucial to many learning activities in the classroom. Children often have to hold information in mind whilst engaged in an effortful activity. The information to be remembered may, for example, be the sentence that they intend to write while trying to spell the individual words. It could also be the list of instructions given by the teacher while carrying out individual steps in the task.

Children with small working memory capacities will struggle in these activities, simply because they are unable to hold in mind sufficient information to allow them to complete the task. In these situations, their working memory is overloaded. Losing crucial information from working memory will cause them to forget many things: instructions they are attempting to follow, the details of what they are doing, where they have got to in a complicated task, and so on. Because children with poor working memory fail in many different activities on many occasions due to working memory overload, they are likely to struggle to achieve normal rates of learning and so will typically make poor general academic progress.

For such children, we recommend an educational approach in which the teacher monitors the child’s classroom learning activities and modifies them if necessary in order to ensure that he or she is working within their working memory capacity rather than being overloaded. This will help the child to complete and succeed in these activities, and so will build up knowledge and skills across time in a way that will facilitate learning. More detailed guidance about this approach is provided in the ‘Classroom support for children with working memory problems’ section.

Case study of a child with poor working memory

Naman is a 6-year-old boy with an impairment of working memory. His nonverbal IQ is in the normal range. He is a quiet child who is well-behaved in the classroom, and is relatively popular with his peers. He has been placed in the lowest ability groups in both literacy and numeracy. His teacher feels that he often fails to listen to what she says to him, and that he is often ‘in a world of his own’. In class, Naman often struggles to keep up with classroom activities. For example, when the teacher wrote on the board ‘Monday 11th November’ and, underneath, ‘The Market’, which was the title of the piece of work, he Understanding Working Memory 13 lost his place in the laborious attempt to copy the words down letter by letter, writing ‘moNemarket’. It appeared that he had started to write the date, forgotten what he was doing and began writing the title instead. He also frequently fails to complete structured learning activities. In one instance, when his teacher handed Naman his computer login cards and told him to go and work on the computer numbered 13, he failed to do this because he had forgotten the number. On another occasion, Naman was encouraged to use a number line when counting the number of ducks shown on two cards but struggled to coordinate the act of jumping along the line with counting up to the second number. He abandoned the attempt, solving the sum instead by counting up the total number of ducks on the two cards. Naman also has difficulty with activities that combine storage of multiple items with other demanding mental processing. For example, when asked to identify two rhyming words in a four-line text read aloud by the teacher, Naman was unable to match the sound structures of the pair of words, store them and then recall them when the teacher finished reading the text.

Classroom support for children with working memory problems

As yet, no certain ways of directly improving working memory in children such as Nathan have been developed. However, there is plenty that can be done to enhance learning in children with working memory problems. The approach that we recommend involves teachers managing children’s working memory loads in the classroom, with the aim of alleviating the disruptive consequences on learning of excessive working memory loads.

The following recommendations should be used to guide both the development of lesson plans for children with working memory impairments and the monitoring of children’s performance in class. In each case, the aim is to minimise the chances that the child will fail to complete the intended learning activity successfully due to working memory failures.

1. Recognise working memory failures

Working memory failures typically manifest themselves in frequent errors of the following kinds:

• incomplete recall, such as forgetting some or all of the words in a sentence, or of a sequence of words

• failing to follow instructions, including remembering only the part of a sequence of instructions, or forgetting the content of an instruction (for example, the child correctly remembers to go to Mrs Seema’s classroom as instructed by the teacher, but once there cannot remember the content of the message to be given)

• place-keeping errors – for example, repeating and/or skipping letters and words during sentence writing, missing out large chunks of a task

• task abandonment – the child gives up a task completely.

If these types of activity failure are observed, it is recommended that the working memory demands of the task are considered (see point 2) and if believed to be excessive, the activity should be repeated with reduced working memory loads (see point 3).

2. Monitor the child

It is important to monitor the child’s working memory regularly in the course of demanding activities. This will include:

• looking for warning signs of memory overload (see point 1);

• ask the child directly – for example, ask for details of what s/he is doing and intends to do next.

In cases when the child has forgotten crucial information:

• repeat information as required

• break down tasks and instructions into smaller components to minimise memory load

• encourage the child to request information when required.

3. Evaluate the working demands of learning activities

Activities that impose heavy storage demands typically involve the retention of significant amounts of verbal material with a relatively arbitrary content. Some examples of activities with working memory demands that are likely to exceed the capacities of a child with working memory deficits include:

• remembering sequences of three or more numbers or unrelated words (e.g. 5, 9, 2, 6 or cat, lion, kangaroo)

• remembering and successfully following lengthy instructions (e.g. Put your sheets on the green table, arrow cards in the packet, put your pencil away, and come and sit on the carpet)

• remembering lengthy sentences containing some arbitrary content to be written down (e.g. To blow up parliament, Guy Fawkes had 36 barrels of gunpowder)

• keeping track of the place reached in the course of multi-level tasks (e.g. writing a sentence down either from memory or from the white board)

4. Reduce working memory loads if necessary

In order to avoid working-memory-related failures (see point 1), working memory loads in structured activities should be decreased. This can be achieved in a number of ways, including:

• reducing the overall amount of material to be stored (e.g. shortening sentences to be written or number of items to be remembered)

• increasing the meaningfulness and degree of familiarity of the material to be remembered

• simplifying the linguistic structures of verbal material (e.g. using simple active constructions rather than passive forms with embedded clauses in activities involving remembering sentences, and in instructions)

• reducing processing demands (see point 5)

• re-structuring multi-step tasks into separate independent steps, supported by memory aids if possible

• making available and encouraging the use of external devices that act as memory aids for the child; these include ‘useful spellings’ on white boards and cards, providing number lines, printed notes, and dictaphones to store information that needs to be remembered.

5. Be aware that processing demands increase working memory loads

Although children may be capable of storing a particular amount of information in one situation, a demanding concurrent processing task will increase working memory demands and so may lead to memory failure, as illustrated in the two examples below of children with working memory deficits.

Example 1 The children in Naman’s class were asked to identify the rhyming words in a text read aloud by the teacher. They had to wait until all four lines had been read before telling the teacher the two words that rhymed: tie and fly. This task involves matching the sound structures of a pair of words, and storing them. Naman was unable to do this, although he was able to remember two words under conditions where no concurrent processing was required.


Example 2 An activity in Jay’s class involved the teacher writing number sequences on the white board with some numbers missing. She counted the numbers aloud as she wrote them, and asked the class what numbers she had missed out. In each case, there was more than one number missing (e.g. 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8). In this activity, the child has to use his/her number knowledge to identify each missing number, and store them. On all occasions, Jay was unable to identify the missing numbers. In such cases, steps should be taken to modify the learning activity in order to reduce working memory loads (see point 3).

6. Frequently repeat important information

It is good practice when working with children with working memory deficits to regularly repeat information that is crucial to ongoing activities. This will include:

• general classroom management instructions

• task-specific instructions (what the whole activity consists of, broken down into simple steps) • detailed content intrinsic to an activity (e.g. the particular sentence to be written). Understanding Working Memory Children should also be encouraged to request repetition of important information in cases of forgetting.

7. Encourage the use of memory aids

A variety of tools that support memory are in common use in classrooms – these include number lines, Unifix blocks and other counting devices, cards, dictaphones, personalised dictionaries with useful spellings, teacher notes on the class white board, and wall charts. These tools can help in several different ways to reduce working memory loads – they may reduce the processing demands of the activity (e.g. useful spellings and Unifix blocks), and they may also reduce the storage load of the task and so help the child keep their place (e.g. number lines).

However, many children with working memory problems often struggle to use such tools, possibly because of the initial cost of mastering the new skill. It is therefore recommended that children are given practice in the use of memory aids in situations with minimal working memory demands in order to establish mastery of the basic skill, before their use in more complex activities with higher working memory loads.


8. Develop the child’s use of memory-relieving strategies

Children with working memory deficits are typically aware of when they have forgotten crucial information, but often do not know what to do in such situations. An important role for the teacher is to encourage the child to develop strategies for overcoming memory problems. These will include:

• use of rehearsal to maintain important information

• use of memory aids (see point 7)

• organisational strategies – breaking tasks down into component parts where possible

• asking for help when important information has been forgotten.

Happy Parenting !!!