Working Memory Strategies

Dear Melissa,

My daughter is in 9th grade. She was tested in 4th grade for Central Auditory Processing and they said she most likely had it but her verbal skills were low so they wouldn’t say conclusively. She has low working memory and slow processing speed. She did Cogmed, but her school test scores were not improved. 

I would appreciate any ideas you have that can help her with working memory. I am most interested in strategies and interventions I can help her with. Thank you very much.

 

Here are some strategies I found at Can Learn Society to develop Working Memory:

Strategies

MONITOR THE STUDENT

• Ask the student to verbalize their steps in completing tasks they often struggle to complete. This can provide important information about where the breakdown is occurring and what supports are likely to work best.
• Evaluate the working memory demands of learning activities. A student with working memory difficulties will need more support as tasks get longer, become more complex, have unfamiliar content or demand more mental processing.

 

REDUCE THE MEMORY LOAD

• Break tasks into smaller chunks. One task at a time is best, if possible.
• Reduce the amount of material the student is expected to complete.
• Keep new information or instructions brief and to the point, and repeat in concise fashion for the student, as needed.
• Provide written directions for reference.
• Simplify the amount of mental processing required by providing several oral “clues” for a problem and writing key words for each clue on the board or interactive whiteboard. This way the student does not have to hold all of the information in mind at once.
• Increase the meaningfulness of the material by providing examples students can relate to.
• Provide information in multiple ways: speak it, show it, and create opportunities to physically work with it or model it.
• Develop routines, such as specific procedures for turning in completed assignments. Once a routine is practiced repeatedly, it becomes automatic and reduces the working memory demand.

REPEAT AND REVIEW

• Be prepared to repeat information.
• Use visual reminders of the steps needed to complete a task.
• Provide opportunities to repeat the task.
• Encourage practice to increase the amount of information encoded into memory.
• Teach students to practice in short sessions, repeatedly throughout the day. Spaced practice is more effective than massed practice. Have students practice new skills or information in short sessions over the course of the day rather than in one long session. For example, give the student a set of key facts to review for a few minutes two or three times during the school day, and encourage them to review again at home both at night and in the morning.

 

USE ADVANCE ORGANIZERS

• Use advance organizers and teach students how to use them. For example, KWL (What I Know, What I Want to Know, What I Learned) is a graphic organizer that helps students focus on what is to be learned. This tool activates prior knowledge, helps generate questions to explore and then assists students to connect what they learn to what they already know.

TEACH STEP-BY-STEP STRATEGIES

• Teach one strategy at a time in brief, focused sessions.
• Teach students when, where, why and how to use the strategy.
• Review and activate prior knowledge.
• Be overt and explicit.
• Model and think aloud.
• Have skilled students model steps.
• Encourage use and practice.
• Evaluate and recognize effort and success.
• Encourage self-monitoring.
• Promote transfer to other situations, times, activities and groups.

ENCOURAGE THE USE OF MEMORY AIDS

• Use visual posters, e.g. of multiplication tables.
• Create posters of commonly used words.
• Provide instructions in written form – could be a handout, whiteboard, or simply a sticky note.
• Provide a key word outline to refer to while you are teaching.
• Encourage the use of checklists for multi-step tasks (e.g., steps for editing written work, timelines for assignments).
• Encourage students to make lists of reminders regularly.
• Use graphic organizers to teach new concepts and information. When the student can picture how the ideas are interrelated, they can be stored and retrieved more easily.
• Consider educational technology that reduces the demand on working memory, such as calculators, word processors, spell-check devices, grammar-check devices, and voice dictation and text readers.
• Use rhymes, songs, movements and patterns, such as ’30 days hath September’ rhyme for remembering the number of days in each calendar month. Music and physical routines linked to fact learning can help students memorize faster and act as a cue for retrieving specific information.

PAUSE, PARAPHRASE, SUMMARIZE AND ALLOW TIME

• Stop at least two times per lesson and request a quick summary from students – “what have we learned so far?” – followed by quick notes on the board. Research overwhelmingly indicates that at least 40% of total learning time needs to be spent reviewing new material.
• Request students to paraphrase, or have another student paraphrase verbally delivered directions. Research has repeatedly shown that youth are more likely to “hear” and “remember” if they hear their own voice or a peer’s voice.
• Allow time for rehearsal and processing.
• Allow extra time for the student to retrieve information. These students benefit from advance warning that they will be asked a question.
• Avoid open-ended questions

 

GET PHYSICAL

• Active participation with the material such as repeatedly hearing it, seeing it and moving it, holds the information in working memory so it can move to long-term memory. Let the students move around, use hands-on material and put information on file cards so they can be manipulated.
• Wherever possible, use games such as Jeopardy® and Scrabble®, drama and art to reinforce concepts.

COLOUR CODE

• Physical coding, such as consistent colours for different subject areas, can act as triggers to help students remember information. ooTry coding when teaching new concepts: when teaching sentence structure nouns are always red, verbs are always green etc.
• Spelling – highlight difficult parts of new words.
• Vocabulary – teach new words in categories or families and colour code the categories.
• Encourage the use of coloured pens or highlighters (remember, yellow is the LEAST effective).

MAKE OVERT LINKS

• Try to get the students to link new information to prior knowledge – encourage drawing, writing and verbal reflection. The use metaphors, analogies, imagery or induced imagery (where the image is generated by the individual, rather than given to them) can help.
• Start each lesson with a quick review of the previous lesson – always write down key words as the students recall information to model “trigger words”.
• End each lesson with a summary of what was learned.

KEY WORDS

• Teach students to listen for key words. Post the words in the classroom and frequently use them as cues while you teach.
• Often students with working memory difficulties also exhibit word and information retrieval difficulties. They frequently experience the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, or may produce the wrong details within the correct concept. The student may need additional time to retrieve details when answering a question. Cues may be necessary to help them focus on the correct bit of information or word.