Tracy Packiam Alloway, PhD

Here is a link to an article on my research that appeared in the Sunday Post, UK.

Read these sentences and decide if they are true or false:

1.      Bananas live in water: True or False

2.      Flowers smell nice: True or False

3.      Dogs have four legs: True or False

Now, without looking at those sentences, can you remember the last word in each sentence in the correct order? If you were able to remember them, congratulate yourself. Your working memory is like an average 10 year old. This test is an example of the Listening Recall test from the Automated Working Memory Assessment. It measures verbal (auditory) working memory.

Brain imaging has confirmed that when we perform working memory tests, like the one above, there is electrical activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. We use different parts of the brain to remember verbal and visual-spatial information. Scientists suggest that the lower area of the prefrontal cortex (ventrolateral) is responsible for verbal working memory, while the higher area (dorsolateral) is linked to spatial working memory. These two areas are also linked to the different processes in performing a working memory task: the ventrolateral areas are engaged with keeping information active and the dorsolateral areas are involved in processing or managing information. Other areas of the brain are also activated during working memory tasks. When we engage in visual-spatial tasks, parts of the right-hemisphere and the hippocampus are also activated. In verbal working memory tasks, there is activation in the left-hemisphere, particularly in the ‘language centers’ such as Broca’s area. What is the take home message? Protect your head, you will need it for the rest of your life!

Adapted from Improing Working Memory: Supporting Students’ Learning (Sage Publication, 2010)

What is working memory like in students with Autistic Spectrum Disoder (ASD)? Let’s first look at verbal short-term memory skills in high functioning ASD students. Their skills in this area can vary, in some cases, students can have above average short-term memory, while others perform at the same level of a student with language impairments. In my own research, I found that high functioning teenagers display a verbal short-term memory problem . The type of material they have to remember provides us with a clue to their memory profile. They struggle in particular with abstract information like nonsense words or new vocabulary. Why? The strategy they use to remember can over-burden them. Studies confirm that even high functioning individuals do not use their long-term memory or visual strategies to support immediate recall. Instead, they rehearse things over and over again to prevent forgetting. While this can be useful in remembering short sequences of information, it is ultimately a time-consuming and inefficient strategy to simply keep repeating things.

Now let’s look at their working memory profile. The majority of individuals with ASD do not have deficits in this area. In visual working memory tasks, they are shown a matrix with dots that appear in random locations and have to recall their location in backwards sequence. Both my own research as well as other studies confirms that their performance is similar to their same-aged typically developing peers, and those with the same IQ level. In the classroom, this means that they won’t have any difficulty with remembering information that is visually presented. The problem arises when they have to use their eyes to track the movements of a teacher as part of a lesson. Even high functioning individuals have trouble shifting their gaze from one thing to another and may misidentify the relevant information to focus on. Remember that one feature of ASD is their ability to concentrate on one thing at a time. In the classroom, they can find it distracting to shift their visual attention from the board to the teacher talking and back again, and as a result struggle to remember the lesson even if it is presented visually.

Verbal working memory is not impaired in individuals with ASD. Students who are low functioning can perform lower than their same-age peers but when they are compared with peers with the same IQ levels, their verbal working memory performance is similar. In some cases, psychologists have observed weaknesses in verbal working memory. However, this is likely the result of having to visually scan material to pick out the relevant information, rather than a working memory deficit per se. Studies of brain activity reveal a very interesting pattern. When a child with ASD is presented with two tasks and has to focus on one while ignoring the other distracting task, their brain activity reveals that they do not actually shift their attention to the more important information. They have a difficult time determining what information is important. In the classroom, some students with ASD might appear to struggle with certain memory-heavy activities. However, this may be connected to their difficulty in knowing what they should focus on, rather than poor working memory.

*Alloway et al (2009). Journal of Learning Disabilities READ

I was invited to write a blog post for SharpBrains. Here is the entry:

Working memory is the ability to hold information in your head and manipulate it mentally. You use this mental workspace when adding up two numbers spoken to you by someone else without being able to use pen and paper or a calculator. Children at school need this memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks such as following teachers’ instructions or remembering sentences they have been asked to write down.

The main goal of this article was to investigate the predictive power of working memory and IQ in learning in typically developing children over a six-year period. This issue is important because distinguishing between the cognitive skills underpinning success in learning is crucial for early screening and intervention.

In this study, typically developing students were tested for their IQ and working memory at 5 years old and again when they were 11 years old. They were also tested on their academic attainments in reading, spelling and maths.

The findings revealed that a child’s success in all aspects of learning is down to how good their working memory is regardless of IQ score. Critically, working memory at the start of formal education is a more powerful predictor of subsequent academic success than IQ in the early years.

This unique finding is important as it addresses concerns that general intelligence, still viewed as a key predictor of academic success, is unreliable. An individual can have an average IQ score but perform poorly in learning.

Some psychologists suggest that the link between IQ and learning is greatest when the individual is learning new information, rather than at later stages when it is suggested that gains made are the result of practice.

Yet the findings from this research that working memory capacity predicted subsequent skills in reading, spelling, and math suggests that some cognitive skills contribute to learning beyond practice effects.

The study also found that, as opposed to IQ, working memory is not linked to the parents’ level of education or socio-economic background. This means all children regardless of background or environmental influence can have the same opportunities to fulfil potential if working memory is assessed and problems addressed where necessary.

Working memory is a relatively stable construct that has powerful implications for academic success. While working memory does increase with age, its relative capacity remains constant. This means that a child at the bottom 10 percentile compared to their same-aged peers is likely to remain at this level throughout their academic career.

In summary, the present article suggests that the traditional reliance on IQ as a benchmark for academic success may be misguided. Instead, schools should focus on assessing working memory as it is the best predictor of reading, spelling and math skills six years later. At present, poor working memory is rarely identified by teachers, who often describe children with this problem as inattentive or as having lower levels of intelligence. However, there are standardized assessments that are suitable for educators to use to screen their students for working memory problems. For example, the Automated Working Memory Assessment (published by the Psychological Corporation) allows non-specialist assessors such as classroom teachers to screen their students for significant working memory problems quickly and effectively.

Problems with working memory can be easily addressed in schools—an advantage over IQ which is more difficult to influence by teachers. Early intervention in working memory could lead to a reduction in the number of those failing schools and help address the problem of under-achievement in schools.

Alloway & RG Alloway (2010) Journal of Experimental Child Psychology READ

The 3Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. We all remember going to school and trying to memorize spelling words and our times tables, to write a coherent paragraph and to calculate our long division. But for some students, this clearly isn’t enough. Despite the focus on the 3Rs why do we still see so many students diagnosed with learning disabilities? Furthermore, why do these students fail to improve after one-to-one instruction or tutoring?

In a recent study that I conducted, I looked at a group of students from 8 to 11 years with learning difficulties. All the students were receiving extra educational support, like tutoring and special classes. I tested their IQ, working memory, and also looked at their grades in the 3 Rs. These students received special tutoring in small groups for the next two years. Yet, when I saw these students two years later, there were still performing at the bottom of the class! Their learning outcomes had not improved, they were still struggling. Except now they were becoming more frustrated because of their learning difficulties and this was manifesting itself as behavior problems, including truancy.

What happened to these students? Why didn’t they show any improvement?

I found that it was their working memory scores, but NOT their IQ, that determined their grades. If they had poor working memory, they struggled in reading, writing, and math. It didn’t even matter what their IQ was. Working memory was the critical skill linked to their learning.

What does this mean? Simply, that focusing on teaching reading and math isn’t enough. That ‘hard work’ without focusing on working memory is just hard work. That drilling the 3Rs without improving working memory is like entering a bike race with flat tires. This is not to say that the 3Rs are unimportant. They are! Even a child with the high working memory needs to learn the 3Rs to do well in school and life. However, if we don’t develop working memory skills, the 3Rs won’t make a difference.

*TP Alloway (2009) European Journal of Psychological Assessments. READ

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

The Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA) is a computer-based assessment of working memory skills, with a user-friendly interface. This culture-fair tool provides a practical and convenient way for educational professionals to screen individuals for significant working memory problems. It is standardized for use with individuals from early childhood (4 years) to adulthood (22 years). To date, it has been translated into over 15 languages.

BENEFITS

1. The AWMA is quick

The Screener version is made up of 2 tests (Listening Recall and Spatial Recall) and takes less than 10 minutes to administer. The automated presentation of tests and automatic generation of a report with standard scores and percentiles make it easy to use.

2. The AWMA provides standard scores that identify students with a deficit

The AWMA is highly effective in identifying students at risk. In my own research, I have used the AWMA in a recent study to screen over 4000 students. The majority of those with poor working memory (identified using the AWMA) scored poorly on attainment measures (such as the WIAT and BPVS).  Scores on the AWMA reliably identify those who need extra support in the classroom, as well as those who take longer to process information.

3. The AWMA is reliable and valid

Test reliability refers to the consistency with which a test can accurately measure what it aims to do. If an individual’s performance remains consistent over repeated trials, it is considered to be reliable. The test-retest coefficients for the AWMA are high, indicating a consistency in measuring working memory skills. These coefficients are reported in the AWMA manual.

Test validity of the AWMA was established by comparing performance to the Working Memory Index in the WISC. The findings demonstrate that the AWMA is a valid test of working memory.

4. The AWMA has been used in many published articles in high-quality peer-reviewed journals, linking working memory to learning.

The AWMA is a well-established test in assessing working memory. Published research confirms that those with low scores on the AWMA score below-average in learning outcomes and take much longer to process information.

To find out more about the AWMA, a free demo and research articles, click here.

The WISC is a standardized assessment of cognitive abilities in children aged 6 to 16 years and revised versions include the Working Memory Index.

DIGIT SPAN

The Digit Span test is a highly validated method of measuring aspects of working memory capacity, and is fast and reliable to administer. However, the method of combining forward digit span with backward digit span scores conflates verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory. This can artificially raise a student’s working memory score as they may do well on the forward digit span subtest, yet struggle in the backward digit span subtest.

LETTER-NUMBER SEQUENCING

This subtest draws heavily on the student’s knowledge of basic number skills and the alphabet. Students may perform poorly on this subtest, not because they have working memory problems, but because they struggle in remembering the alphabet or numbers in the correct sequence.

ARITHMETIC

The supplementary test, arithmetic, can also be calculated into the Working Memory Index. However, it is not clear that this test genuinely provides a direct measure of working memory measure, although it certainly would be expected that children with poor working memory would be slow to develop the necessary mathematical knowledge to support good levels of performance on this test. It is therefore not recommended that arithmetic test scores are interpreted as direct assessments of working memory.

There are other limitations to the Working Memory Index. One practical drawback is that the WISC-IV is cannot be used with children below 6 years. Another is the heavy reliance on verbal information. This raises the possibility that a student who has particular problems in handling verbal information mentally may perform at low levels on these tests simply because of the format of the material, and not because of working memory problems. For example, students who fail to develop language struggle greatly on these kinds of memory test that involve spoken language, but perform at entirely normal levels when the information that is being remembered is non-verbal - such as remembering a pattern in a grid or the location of an object on a screen. So although these children have substantial working memory problems, they are probably secondary rather than primary in nature, and they also have working memory strengths that would be undetected by administration of the WISC-IV.

Read more in Working memory and learning: A practical guide

The typical characteristics of students with poor working memory are as follows. They have normal social relationships with their peers, but are reserved in group situations in the classroom, in which they tend not to participate actively.  Their academic progress is very slow, particularly in reading and maths. They struggle to meet the working memory demands of many classroom activities, and have particularly problems in remembering and following instructions, in coping with tasks that involve combining the storage of information with demanding mental processing, and in keeping track of their progress in complex tasks.

Teachers view the students as having poor attention span and being highly distractible, features that we suggest are consequences of the loss of information that is relevant to the ongoing task from working memory, resulting in task failure and loss of focus.

While these characteristics typify the majority of students with working memory problems, they are not on their own sufficient for a definitive ‘diagnosis’. Reduced working memory capacity is not the only cause of many of these classroom difficulties, although there is growing evidence that it is the most common one.

Some students can have a broader constellation of cognitive problems of which reduced working memory capacity is only one. Several relatively common developmental disorders in which working memory is impaired, including language impairment, dyslexia, ADHD, and developmental coordination disorder (dyspraxia). Importantly, these disorders have distinct working memory strengths and weaknesses that impact academic attainment.

Clear identification of working memory problems and their underlying causes is therefore a priority, and a range of methods has now been developed to support the assessment of working memory in children. I will discuss different assessments in next week’s blog.

Excerpt taken from Working memory and learning: A practical guide.

Think of a shanty town in rural Brazil. The streets are dusty, the water quality is poor, and the people are impoverished. More than half the kids never finish school. You don’t expect to hear of famous doctors or high flying lawyers coming from these areas. You probably don’t even expect them to finish high school. It’s not hard to imagine why. There is so much working against these kids. Less than 15% will finish elementary school. Most leave without learning to read. Schools can’t afford to pay their teachers much and those teachers that do stick around don’t always have the skills and training to do their job. But is there anything going for these underdogs? Could they have the same ability and potential of their richer urban peers?

My colleagues decided to test this theory*. They compared rural low-income kids with those from wealthy urban areas in Brazil in vocabulary and working memory tests. You would expect that the rural kids struggle behind their urban peers. Sure enough, that’s the case with the vocabulary test. The urban kids excel in matching words with the correct definitions. They far supersede their rural counterparts in their knowledge, because they’ve had more experience using the words on the test. But guess what, they are no better then the rural kids on the working memory tests.

Surprised?

It boils down to one thing-opportunity. The urban children had more opportunity to learn-at home, their parents have the skill and time to teach them, at school they receive more attention from teachers. They have had a rich base of knowledge cultivated over the years.

But here’s the thing-the rural kids have the same ability to succeed. Their working memory skills are no different from their urban peers. They’re not unintelligent, they just haven’t been given the same opportunity to unlock the potential of their working memory.

The exciting thing about working memory is that it is an EQUALIZER: we can help a child succeed, regardless of their background, simply by taking the opportunity to develop their working memory.

*P. Engel (2008). Journal of Speech, Language, Hearing Research