Written By: P.V.Ananthalakshmi Principal, Helikx Open School
Picture Courtesy: Aravinth Anbalagan (our former student)
I called Arun and asked him to get my pink folder that I had kept in my room and the worksheets from the office and green, red marker pens. He returned back after 15 minutes and was holding a green marker pen. He was looking a bit confused and asked, “Madam, You wanted a pen isn’t it?” I thanked him for helping me and asked him to be seated.
As a teacher we might have faced such situation where some students are not able to remember even the simple instructions given in the classroom.
Why some students behave like this? What's the reason?
Poor working memory makes it hard for children to use the information they get in school or at home. Most children with learning and attention issues have trouble with working memory and have trouble with this vital function.
That’s especially true of students with executive functioning issues and ADHD.
What is working memory?
Working memory, or operative memory, can be defined as the set of processes that allow us to store and manipulate temporary information and carry-out complex cognitive tasks like language comprehension, reading, learning, or reasoning. Working memory is a type of short-term memory.
How can we support them in the classroom?
Visual image:
Provide a situation and ask the student to create a picture of what he heard or read (e.g. a busy road) ask him to create a mental picture or to draw the picture. This helps to work on his visualisation skills. When he gets better at visualising, he can describe the image, instead of drawing it.
Visual memory:
Memory games like matching games, finding the places in Atlas, to circle certain letters in the book within a minute and so on.
Active reading:
Use highlighters, sticky notes, underlining while reading helps to keep the information for a long time in the mind and recall can be made easy.
Reading aloud, asking questions from the reading material also helps to store in long term memories.
Chunking information into small bites:
While reading spelling for long words syllabification helps to remember the spelling. While remembering long numbers it’s easier to remember a few small groups of numbers than it is to remember one long string of numbers.
Multistep instructions can be simplified into step by step one at a time or written instructions, graphic organisers to help to break writing assignments into smaller pieces and make the task easier.
Making it multi-sensory:
Processing information in as many ways as possible can help with working memory and long-term memory. Write tasks down so your child can look at them. Say them out loud so your child can hear them. Toss a ball back and forth while you discuss the tasks your child needs to complete.
Using multi-sensory strategies can help your child keep information in mind long enough to use it.
Help make connections:
By helping to form an association to connect various details helps to improve long retrieving long -term memory. Fun mnemonics makes the task more enjoyable and remembers the sequence. It also helps with working memory, which is what we use to hold and compare new and old memories. To support for executive functions memory boosting tricks and games are some of the ways. Visualising thoughts improve working memory. Finding ways to connect information helps long term memory as well as working memory.
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