I was recently invited to share my research on BBC Radio. Here are some details on the programme from the BBC website:
IQ TESTING
IQ testing has long been a controversial way of measuring intelligence, but now there are claims that there’s another, more accurate method of predicting academic success: working memory, or the capacity we have to learn. Dr Tracy Alloway, whose recent experiments showed that testing working memory predicted children’s grades more accurately than traditional IQ, speaks up for working memory. LISTEN
There is exciting research emerging on the benefit of brain training. The question is: what works? Is it enough to memorize numbers in backwards order? Previous research outlines programs where students remember number sequences for a few weeks. Although improvements in working memory were reported, there are clear limitations. Most notably, there was no transfer effect: training working memory did not improve academic attainment. This leads to the possibility that some brain training programs are just ‘training for the test’, which means you are just getting better at playing the training games.
In order to address this issue, I recently conducted a clinical trial with two groups of students: the Training group participated in a working memory training program (www.JungleMemory.com) and the Control group received targeted educational support (IEP). The two groups did not differ in their IQ, working memory, or academic scores pre-training.
Both the Training and the Control groups underwent 8-weeks of their respective training programs and then were retested on the IQ, working memory, and academic tests.
The results were dramatic. The Control group did not perform much better without intervention, and in some instances they performed even worse in math and working memory.
In contrast, the Training group demonstrated a clear improvement not only in IQ and working memory tests, but crucially in learning outcomes as well. Students on the working memory training program went from a C to a B, or a B to an A after just 8 weeks of training! This is an exciting step in demonstrating that the right brain training can significantly boost academic attainment.
There is often a greater number of dyslexics in English-speaking countries compared to countries like China, Japan, and even Spain and Italy. Why do we see this difference across countries?
The answer can be found by looking at one cause of dyslexia: a difficulty in processing and remembering the sounds of phonemes. English is a particularly complex language and one that has been described as ‘orthographically nontransparent’. This means that the phonemes do not always have the same sounds. Languages like English that are not ‘transparent’ give rise to greater difficulties in reading.
In contrast, other language such as Spanish and Italian are orthographically transparent and it is easy to match the letter with the correct sound. Languages, such as Chinese or Japanese (Kanji), that use characters require greater use of visual memory, rather than verbal memory skills.
Brain imaging studies have found dyslexics in different languages (English, French and Italian) all showed the same brain deficits involving difficulty in processing verbal information.
Some might suggest that the differences in the education system across countries lead to higher rates of dyslexia in some countries. However, studies that have looked at bilingual children have found that they can struggle in reading in one language (usually English), yet be excellent readers in another language (such as Chinese or Spanish).
