Working Memory Training in the Classroom

Retrieval Practice: Beneficial for All Students or Moderated by Individual Differences?

“…Studies show that students with high WMC (Alloway & Alloway, 2010;Cowan, 2014), executive functioning (St. Clair-Thompson & Gathercole, 2006), or IQ (Deary et al, 2007) perform better in school than students who possess lower abilities in these areas. Working memory (Baddeley, 2010) has been suggested to have an essential role in a number of skills required for being successful in school, as well as for coping well with classroom activities in general (see Alloway, 2006, for a review). There are several hints that WMC may play an important role in learning word pairs (Swedish-Swahili word pairs were used in the present study) and to retrieving them across a period of four weeks.…”

Designing mathematics standards in agreement with science

“…Cognitive science defines a chunk as a collection of encoded sensory (e.g., visual, sound) elements that have been stored and wired together in LTM and have meaning (Anderson, 1996;Dehaene, 2020, p. 6;Willingham, 2006). Novel data chunks that must be stored in WM slots include the problem goal, initial data/information, and answers found at middle-steps that must be looked up or mentally calculated rather than quickly recalled from LTM (Alloway, 2006;Luck & Vogel, 2013;Willingham, 2006).…”

Memory Mates: An Evaluation of a Classroom-Based, Student-Focused Working Memory Intervention

“…The demands of individual learning episodes can be too challenging and cognitively effortful for such students; therefore, they fail to acquire critical knowledge and skills necessary to engage with learning tasks and thus fail to make the same rate of progress in learning and academic achievement as their peers (Alloway, 2009;Gathercole & Alloway, 2007). Further, individual differences in performance on working memory tasks exist, particularly across ages (Gathercole & Alloway, 2007, but with high degrees of variability in terms of upper, lower and mean levels of capacity within specific age levels (Alloway, 2006;Gathercole, Lamont, & Alloway, 2006). Alloway and Alloway (2010) clarified that working memory is separate from intelligence, as measured with a large meta-analysis (Ackerman, Beier, & Boyle, 2005), noting that working memory is a specific, independent cognitive structure and one that predicts future learning alongside academic knowledge.…”

“…There are a number of reasons to hypothesise that a student-focused classroom intervention would be more successful, particularly when their teacher is also trained in appropriate classroom-oriented adjustments to enhance attention and working memory strategies for all students, and is also trained to support the students' individual use of attention and working memory strategies. First, students have been found to display realistic insight into their working memory failures (Alloway, 2006), whereas teachers may not recognise the nature of specific working memory problems (Normand & Tannock, 2014). Second, there is evidence that suggests that allowing students to self-direct and become independent in managing their own learning is beneficial to academic outcomes (Sitzmann & Ely, 2011) and classroom engagement (Boekaerts & Corno, 2005).…”

“…Working memory is defined as the capacity to temporarily hold and manipulate information (Baddeley, 2000), and it is a limited capacity that can be overloaded by excessive storage or processing demands at school (Alloway, 2006). More specifically, 'working memory consists of several interacting subsystems that include specialised stores for verbal and visuo-spatial material, and an attentional component that controls activity within working memory' (Gathercole, 2008, p. 382).…”