Tracy Packiam Alloway, PhD

Students with dyspraxia (DCD) can also have comorbid language impairments (SLI). While these developmental disorders are distinguished by the domain of principal deficit, they are both associated with significant learning difficulties. Studies that followed 7-year olds with dyspraxia found that they struggled with reading and comprehension by the time they were 10 years old. I wanted to know whether the combination of motor coordination difficulties plus language impairments lead to worse learning outcomes compared to those with only motor coordination difficulties or language impairments. I looked at three groups of students: 1) those with SLI but no dyspraxia; 2) those with dyspraxia but normal language skills; 3) those with dyspraxia + language impairments.

There were two key findings. First, visual-spatial memory was the single best test to successfully distinguish a student with dyspraxia from those with language impairments. If you have a student with dyspraxia but normal language skills, their memory profile is the same as those with dyspraxia + language impairments: they will have marked difficulties in visual-spatial working memory. The second finding was that despite relative strengths in language, those with dyspraxia but no language impairments performed as poorly as the group with dyspraxia + language impairments. This means that for a student with dyspraxia their working memory abilities determine their learning difficulties. Any strength in language that they have is not able to sufficiently support their learning. If their working memory is not addressed, then any additional strengths they have, such as in language, will not provide a sufficient platform for learning.

Alloway and Archibald (2008). Journal of Learning Disabiliities. READ

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).

Dyslexia (also referred to as ‘specific reading disability’) affects around 10% to 15% of children. One size does not fit all when describing dyslexia and different students might manifest quite distinct reading problems.

Type 1: PHONOLOGICAL DYSLEXIA
Try reading these words out aloud:

WOOGLEMIT, BLAZNAK, CRIXGO

Students with Phonological Dyslexia have difficulty sounding out nonsense words, like those you just read out, as well as ‘regular’ real words, like FRIEND or BECAUSE.

However, they can recognize irregular words (ENOUGH, YACHT) on paper.

Why? Students with Phonological Dyslexia have very poor verbal (auditory) working memory and they struggle with remembering the sequence of information that is presented out aloud, such as instructions, new vocabulary words, and even names. Their poor verbal working memory means that they have a hard time saying verbal information that is new or unfamiliar to them. This can make them embarrassed to repeat information in front of others.

Type 2: SURFACE DYSLEXIA
These students have the opposite problem: they find it very difficult to recognize words when they are written down. They usually have poor visual working memory, which means that they struggle with reading. Students with Surface Dyslexia can even have difficulty reading words they regularly use in conversation because they can’t recognize written words very well or quickly.

Evidence from brain imaging supports the idea that these different types of dyslexia are the result of problems in different areas of the brain. Verbal (or ‘auditory’) working memory problems are associated with Phonological Dyslexia and visual working memory problems are linked to Surface Dyslexia.

It’s wonderful to hear strategies that teachers found useful in the classroom and I thought that I would share one of them with you. This is from Alison, a Special Need Teacher in Scotland.

“I was trying to teach initial blends to a child with enormous difficulties perceiving the two sounds in initial blends. The task was to identify whether 2 and then which 2 out of 3 words begun with the same blend. Initially I introduced this task orally but quickly realized that if I put out pictures of the words it reduced the memory load and he was able to focus on developing the key skill.  Similarly word tracking tasks where I would like the child to change a letter to make a new word were enormously difficult and threatening for this child. He became distressed when I repeated the words in an attempt to help him. Making a visual picture strip of the word sequence helped to reduce the memory load and enabled him both, to feel a greater sense of control and to focus on the ‘working’ part of the task rather than the ‘memory’ part.”

Have you found something that worked in your classroom? I would love to hear about it.

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.

I was recently invited to write a blog for SharpBrains on a paper I published on this topic. Here is a copy of the blog post.

Working memory is our ability to store and manipulate information for a brief time. It is typically measured by dual-tasks, where the individual has to remember an item while simultaneously processing a sometimes unrelated piece of information. A widely used working memory task is the reading span task where the individual reads a sentence, verifies it, and the recalls the final word. Individual differences in working memory performance are closely related to a range of academic skills such as reading, spelling, comprehension, and mathematics. Crucially, there is emerging research that working memory predicts learning outcomes independently of IQ. One explanation for the importance of working memory in academic attainment is that because it appears to be relatively unaffected by environmental influences, such as parental educational level and financial background, it measures a student’s capacity to acquire knowledge rather than what they have already learned.

However little is known about the consequences of low working memory capacity per se, independent of other associated learning difficulties. In particular, it is not known either what proportion of students with low working memory capacities has significant learning difficulties or what their behavioral characteristics are. The aim of a recent study was to provide the first systematic large-scale examination of the cognitive and behavioral characteristics of school-aged students who have been identified solely on the basis of very low working memory scores.

In screening of over 3000 school-aged students in mainstream schools, 1 in 10 was identified as having working memory difficulties. There were several key findings regarding their cognitive skills. The first is that the majority of them performed below age-expected levels in reading and mathematics. This suggests that low working memory skills constitute a high risk factor for educational underachievement for students. This corresponds with evidence that working memory impacts all areas of learning from kindergarten to college. It is a basic cognitive skill that we need to perform a variety of activities, and we use it in core subjects like reading and maths, as well as general topics like Art and Music. Crucially, this pattern of poor performance in learning outcomes remains even when students’ IQ is statistically accounted. This fits well with evidence suggesting that working memory is even more important to learning than other cognitive skills such as IQ. For example, in typically developing students, I found that their working memory skills, rather than IQ, at 5 years old were the best predictor of predictor of reading, spelling, and math outcomes six years later.

The next major finding from the studies of students with working memory difficulties is that teachers typically judged the students to be highly inattentive, and have short poor attention spans and high levels of distractibility. They were also commonly described as forgetting what they are currently doing and things they have learned, failing to remember instructions, and failing to complete tasks. In everyday classroom activities, they often made careless mistakes, particularly in writing, and had difficulty in solving problems. In contrast, relatively few of the students were judged to exhibit the high levels of hyperactive and impulsive behaviors.

The final key finding is that students with working memory difficulties take a much longer time to process information. They are unable to cope with timed activities and fast presentation of information. As a result, they often end up abandoning the activities all together out of frustration. One way to overcome this difficulty is to provide them with a shorter activity and to allow for more time during tests.

Studies such as these demonstrate that students with working memory difficulties have an extremely high risk of making poor academic progress and are relatively common in the classroom - they represent approximately 10% of their age group in mainstream schooling. Without early intervention, working memory deficits cannot be made up over time and will continue to compromise a child’s likelihood of academic success. How can we support students’ learning? The first crucial step in supporting students with working memory impairments is proper diagnosis, which can be conducted by a school psychologist. However, at present working memory problems often go undetected in students or are misdiagnosed as attentional problems. There are several test batteries that can be used to assess working memory, including the Working Memory Index in the WISC. However, most assessment instruments that are currently available require considerable experience in the administration, scoring and interpretation of cognitive tests. One useful tool to identify and support students with working memory impairments is the Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA; Alloway, 2007 published by Pearson) . The benefit of the AWMA is that it is designed to provide a practical and convenient way for non-expert assessors such as teachers to screen their pupils for significant working memory problems, with a user-friendly interface. The automated presentation and scoring of tasks provide consistency in presentation of stimuli across participants, thus reducing experimenter error. The AWMA was used in the study described here, as well as in numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on the role of working memory in learning, anxiety, and development in typical and clinical populations.

The main goal of this article was to explore the link between working memory and academic performance. On the basis of a large-scale screening study of over 3000 student, 10% were found to have working memory impairments that jeopardize their chance of academic success. The majority perform below age-expected levels in all areas of learning and struggle to follow simple instructions in the classroom. These difficulties highlight the need for early assessment to identify those at risk. In a future article, I will discuss ways to help students with working memory problems, inc luding clinical trials demonstrating successful transfer of cognitive training to academic attainments.

REFERENCE:  Alloway et al. (2009). The cognitive and behavioral characteristics of children with low working memory.  Child Development, 80 , 606-621.

READ IT AT SHARPBRAINS

YOU CAN ALSO READ IT HERE AT SCIENTIA PRO PUBLICA (under ‘Psychology’)

Individuals with dyslexia often have difficulty in understanding the sound structures of words. In particular, they struggle in a skill known as segmentation and blending: breaking up words into smaller segments (e.g., c from –at) and putting them together. This skill is tested using ‘spoonerisms’. Try some yourself—exchange the first letter in each word.

Fat Dog  = Dat Fog

Here are some more, see how quickly you can do them (answers are below)

•    Cat flap
•    Bad salad
•    Soap in your hole
•    Mean as custard
•    Plaster man
•    Flock of bats
•    Chewing the doors

Why do children with dyslexia struggle? One explanation is that they have poor working memory so they struggle to hold all the sound segments in their head while they are doing the spoonerism task. Someone with dyslexia described it like this: “If I can’t see the word, I really struggle. I have to picture it before I can read it“.  The process of keeping two words active in our mental post-it-note, combined with trying to exchange the first letter proves much too difficult for most dyslexics.

So much of language learning relies on working memory. When we learn new words, we have to remember each sound segment, put it together, learn the meaning, and finally remember what it looks like for future use! Someone with poor working memory, like the person with dyslexia, struggles because they simply don’t have a big enough mental post-it-note (working memory) to cope with all these steps.

ANSWERS: Flat cap; Sad ballad; Hope in your soul; Keen as mustard; Master plan; Block of flats; Doing the chores

As a thank you to those who have been reading my blog, I have attached a 20% off voucher for a book:
Working Memory and Learning: A Practical Guide for Teachers

DOWNLOAD VOUCHER

Here are some comments about the book:

‘A clear and accessible account of current theory and research, which is then applied to children’s learning in the classroom….The range of strategies…are well grounded in theory derived from research and sit within a coherent conceptual model’ - The Psychologist

‘An easy to read yet informative book that explains the concepts clearly and offers practitioners ways to support those with poor working memory in the classroom’ - SNIP

`The topic of working memory nowadays tends to dominate discussions with teachers and parents, and both groups can helpfully be directed to this easy-to-read but serious text … (it) is likely to prove a turning-point in the management and facilitation of hard-to-teach children. In a situation muddied by ever-multiplying syndromes and disorders, this book delivers a clarifying and reassuring isolation of the major cognitive characteristic that cuts across all the boundaries and leaves the class teacher and SENCO empowered. I think very highly of the book and shall be recommending it steadily’ - Martin Turner, Child Center for Evaluation and Teaching, Kuwait

Dyslexia is a learning disability that mainly affects reading and spelling. Common features of dyslexia include spelling errors (‘nock’ for ‘knock’; ‘jerney’ for ‘journey’); mixing upper and lowercase letters in writing (for example: ‘numBers’), and confusing letters like ‘b’ and ‘d’.

Individuals with dyslexia also have poor working memory. They take much longer to process information, particularly in reading where they have to connect letter patterns with associated wounds. As a result, they often mix up longer words. One lady described herself as trying to remember ‘risk management report’ for her meeting. As she walked by the office kitchen, the fridge caught her eye and she ended up saying ‘fridge management report’ instead.

They also take much longer to articulate or say information, which means that they easily forget words, especially in conversations. For example, they might say ‘winimum wage’ instead of ‘minimum wage’.

This is hardly surprising as one view of dyslexia is that it is caused by poor working memory. We use our working memory to connect letters with the correct sounds, put them together to form a word, keep that word in mind while we read the next word, string all those words together to form a sentence, and then figure out the meaning of all those words. It’s no wonder that if someone has poor working memory, this can lead to dyslexia. Without good working memory, it is very difficult to perform well in reading and spelling.