Why is it necessary to support children with low working memory?

Over the past years, teachers have shown themselves more interested in
childrens process of learning and which factors are implicated on it, as for
example, working memory. Working memory is a mental workspace that people
can use to store important information while doing mental activities, when working
memory does not work properly the concept low memory is used to explain it.
Unfortunately, there is not a specific cause for this issue, but it seems that genes
play an important role on it. What is more, children with many kinds of learning
difficulties have as a main characteristic a poor working memory. Children with low
working memory would fail on their performance in classes. That is why I strongly
believe that it is very important to support children with low working memory in their
learning process for different reasons that will be developed over this essay.
To begin with, childrens working memory is of essential importance within the
class because there are different activities that require it. When there are children
who have low working memory, some of those activities could become complicated
for them. According to Gathercole & Packiam (2007) activities often require the
child to hold in mind some information (for example, a sentence to be written down)
while doing something that for them is mentally challenging (such as spelling the
individual words in the sentence). Therefore, when children with low working
memory cannot achieve the goal of doing the activities successfully, they may not
get the expected learning. As Gathercole & Packiam (2007) pointed out, the
children may not get the learning benefit of successfully completing and activity,
and this slows down their rates of learning.
Secondly, children with low working memory would obtain bad grades. As it was
mentioned before, students with low working memory usually have problems when
carrying out some activities which require skills such as reading or mathematics;
moreover, this situation could produce different consequences, such as mediocre
school performance. According to Gathercole & Alloway cited by Holmes (2012)
the ending result is frequent lost learning opportunities, and consequently slow
rates of educational progress. In other words, children obtain bad grades because
of a lack of learning; therefore, parents would think that their children are not
making any effort for getting better grades. In addition, teachers and parents
should help children and look for different kinds of activities to guarantee the
learning success.
Finally, as a result of the incompetence to finish some activities by the children with
low working memory, they are seen by teachers as lazy and distracted students.
Children who have this problem of working memory usually cannot follow
instructions with the same speed as the rest of their classmates do. That is to say,

they get distracted while the teacher is giving the instructions easier than their
classmates, so it is a challenge to remember all the steps given by the teacher.
Gathercole & Packiam (2007) pointed out that often it appears that the child has
not paid attention, when in fact they have simply forgotten what it is that they have
to do. Moreover, children really need to be understood by their teachers, in order to
find some strategies to avoid getting lost while doing an activity or while listening to
the teacher giving instructions. In fact, there are strategies that would be helpful for
them; teachers can break the lengthy instructions and create different and easy
steps for their better understanding. Similarly, there is an approach which is the
classroom-based approach focuses on increasing teachers awareness in order to
help and encourage students with low working memory. Thus, students could
reduce memory load in the classroom with an objective of accomplishing learning.
To sum up, three different reasons have been provided along this essay, in order to
sustain that it is very important to support children with low working memory in their
learning process. For example, there are different activities within the class that
require high memory loads; this is a real challenge for children with low working
memory. Also, students with low working memory are more likely to make a poor
academic progress during the school years. Finally, these kinds of students are
seen by teachers and parents as lazy and distracted children, which is not
necessarily true. All things considered, it is completely necessary to help and
support children with low working memory, as well as having this problem; they
have strengths that teachers can develop by using different strategies and suitable
activities.

References

Gathercole, S. E. & Alloway, T. P. (2008). Working memory and learning: A

practical guide.

Holmes, J. (2012). Working memory and learning difficulties, 07 10.

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