Is There a Poverty Gap in Working Memory?
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.
