Students with ADHD often have average or even high IQ. Yet they struggle with learning. I was quite puzzled by this for some time. Then I noticed a similar pattern of behavior problems, such as fidgeting, highly distractible, and lacking motivation, coupled with high IQ in an entirely different group—gifted students. Although their behavioral profile is similar between these two groups, they are driven by different reasons. The ADHD student has difficulty controlling their behavior and inhibiting inappropriate actions, while gifted students ‘act up’ out of boredom or being insufficiently challenged. )
Here is a case study of a boy from my research collaboration with the National Association of Gifted Children in the UK.
Joseph was very articulate and our assessment with him took longer than usual as he asked questions frequently. He loves English and History and tried to begin many debates and discussions with us during the assessment. His mother says that he spends hours and hours researching topics that he finds interesting – these might not be related to school. However, his pattern of behavior on the Conners Rating Scale indicated a very high ADHD. When asked about his motivation levels, he was very apathetic and negative about his school and learning in general.
These two groups of students—ADHD and gifted ones—had similar behavioral patterns and IQ scores. Yet they had very different learning outcomes. Why? When I looked more closely at their scores, I found their working memory profiles were very different. As you would expect, the gifted students had excellent working memory, which was linked to their above average academic outcomes. In contrast, the ADHD students’ poor working memory was linked to low achievement. Average IQ does not suggest average grades. If a student has a working memory problem, they will struggle academically even though they have average IQ ability.
EXCERPT FROM Improving Working Memory
Have you ever caught a student doodling in the middle of a lesson? Well now scientific research supports their efforts to stave off boredom. A recent study compared the working memory of two groups of people: doodlers and non-doodlers. Both groups were asked to listen to a pre-recorded phone message about a birthday party and asked to remember the names of the people coming. The doodling group more names and places mentioned in the phone message compared to the non-doodlers. Doodling while listening can be beneficial because it helps the individual focus and maintain attention instead of tuning out altogether. It is not a demanding activity and acts like a buffer that prevents other activities like daydreaming to interfere with what you have to remember. So if you are worried that a student will start ‘zoning out’ during class, hand them a pencil!
J Andrade (2009) Applied Cognitive Psychology
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 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
There is a long-standing view that boys and girls learn differently. Some people suggest that the fact that so many more boys compared to girls are diagnosed with learning difficulties such as ADHD and dyslexia points to a lack in the education system in supporting a different learning style for boys. Boys just don’t learn language in the same way as girls and as a result struggle to keep up in the classroom.
There is now scientific support for this view: a recent study looked at different parts of the brain that boys and girls use when they do language tasks.* They used brain imaging (fMRI) to look at what part of the brain is activated during writing and spelling. They found that when learning language, boys are more sensory and girls are more abstract. Of course this has major implications for learning and teaching.
What about working memory? Do boys also struggle more in working memory compared to girls? Actually they don’t.** In a recent government-funded study, I surveyed over three thousand children, found that ten per cent of school children across all age ranges suffer from poor working memory seriously affecting their learning. Nationally, this equates to almost half a million children in primary education alone being affected. However, girls are just as likely to struggle with working memory as boys.
The key is to support these students so they can achieve their potential. However, poor working memory is rarely identified by teachers, who often describe children with this problem as inattentive or as having lower levels of intelligence. There is a new tool, a combination of a checklist and computer program informed by several years of concentrated research into poor working memory in children, will for the first time enable teachers to identify and assess children’s memory capacity in the classroom from as early as four years old.
The checklist, called the Working Memory Rating Scale (WMRS), will enable teachers to identify children who they think may have a problem with working memory without immediately subjecting them to a test. A high score on this checklist shows that a child is likely to have working memory problems that will affect their academic progress.
If the teacher feels significantly concerned about a child’s performance in class, he or she can then get the child to do the computerized Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA). The tools also suggest ways for teachers to manage the student’s working memory loads which will minimize the chances of children failing to complete tasks. Recommendations include repetition of instructions, talking in simple short sentences and breaking down tasks into smaller chunks of information.
*J. Booth & T. Bitan (2008). Neuropsychologica
** T.Alloway (2009). Child Development
Is there a Rain Main hiding in us all? Scientists have used special technology to temporarily immobilize part of the brain in healthy adults. The volunteers showed incredible skills similar to autistic savants, such as naming the day when given a date in history (calendar calculating) and drawing abilities.
An autistic savant is someone who is autistic with a special skill, usually related to memory. For example, they might be able to draw an accurate replication of a scene or location after looking at it for just a few minutes. Another example is an amazing ability to perform complicated maths problems in their head or tell you what day it was on 25 February 1869. A child who has savant abilities would be drawing three-dimensional pictures while their friends are scribbling. They might be able put together a jigsaw puzzle that adults struggle doing, without even looking at the picture. Their exceptional memory helps them to recognize patterns in things that would take us ages to figure out.
In an odd twist of nature, autistic savants have such specialized skills because part of their brain is damaged: the left hemisphere that deals with language and processing information. This damage leads to learning disabilities and difficulty coping in everyday situations. To deal with this damage, their right side of the brain is unlocked, resulting in a ‘spotlight’ on one of the five senses. If there is a spotlight on hearing, then the autistic savant has amazing musical skills.
Michael Jackson’s death a few days ago has shocked the world. Like everyone else who grew up in the eighties, I listened to his music, and even saw an advance screening of the Thriller video when it first came out. He was not just a great singer, but a once great businessman, recognizing valuable investments before anyone else did. So how did someone that was once so successful die broke and overdosed on drugs? One possible reason is related to his working memory. The autopsy on the King of Pop showed that he had taken a dangerous cocktail of opiate based drugs, including OxyContin and Demerol. Opiate based drugs impair your working memory, affecting your ability to mentally store and manipulate information. Scientific studies show that those who take opiates struggle to remember even a simple list of words a short time after they have taken opiate-based drugs. It does not need to have been suicide as many people are suggesting. By taking OxyContin and other opiates, Michael Jackson might, quite literally have forgotten how much he had taken, and taken even more – enough to overdose. This seems to have happened more than once as his nanny claims to have pumped his stomach to save his life numerous times. Excessive use of opiates would also explain his problems in controlling his spending as his working memory that would help him evaluate his financial decisions would be lost when under the influence of such drugs.
Spare a thought for Jean who has tried all sorts of diet programs from Weight Watchers to the cabbage-soup diet. Every attempt has resulted in short-term success but long-term failure. Her doctor has given her several warnings about how her obesity will shorten her life. Yet she can’t seem to shed the weight.
You might be wondering: So what does working memory have to do with this?
More than you think. There are a growing number of studies linking working memory to dieting patterns. A study of healthy females found that those who dieted more frequently were more likely to have low working memory levels equivalent to those with anxiety and clinical depression. This means that a preoccupation with weight loss leads to working memory problems. These working memory problems can manifest themselves in a range of ways, from trouble focusing in conversations to forgetting simple instructions; even forgetting to stop by the store to pick up milk on your way home.
But before you pick up that third chocolate doughnut, this is not an endorsement to overindulge for your brain. Instead, if you are following a diet and eating plan, it is important to pick one that maximizes your working memory instead of reduces it. Another study found that a High-Carbohydrate/Low Fat diet is more likely to increase working memory skills compared to a Low-Carbohydrate/High Fat (such as the Atkins).
So eat for your working memory: pass on the bacon and pick the baked potato instead.
