Working memory in children: How does it affect learning? Different methods and techniques that can be used to train and enhance the working memory of children

In every classroom, there are always one or more students who have the tendency to be left behind. We mistakenly label these students as ‘lazy’ or ‘backward’. After time, many teachers lose hope in these children, and the children themselves come to believe that they cannot learn from classroom instruction. Research over the past several years has shown that a key element in the learning abilities of some 10% of all children is their poor working memory. There is a lack of awareness on the part of kindergarten teachers of the nature of working memory and its possible negative impact on learning. Working memory refers to the ability we have to hold certain information in our minds for a short period of time, and to be able to use and manipulate this information as well. Children who have weak working memories cannot keep important information in readiness, to use when the next bits of information become available. This study focused on specific strategies teachers can use in the class with those students. Their intervention helps ensure the inclusion of all students in the learning process. If we are talking about unity and equity, we cannot deprive any group of learners of their right to education because of a learning difficulty that they might have such as a weak working memory, simply because their teachers do not have the knowledge and skills that could help the learner meet a learning challenge. Below is an insight about the different strategies of the working memory intervention used with the kindergarten students. Principles of the classroom based approach: Recognize working memory failures: by identifying children having warning signs of weak working memory. Warning signs are: Difficulty in recalling Failure to follow instructions Place-keeping errors Task abandonment Monitor the child: by checking the presence of any of the warning signs and by asking the child directly about the next step à Repetition Evaluate working memory demands of learning activities. Some factors that affect the working memory demands: Excessive length, unfamiliar content, a demanding mental processing activity Reduce working memory loads by: Contextualization of the content Simplify mental processes Be prepared to repeat Encourage use of memory aids (Writing aids, Mathematical aids) Develop the child’s strategies for supporting memory Request help, rehearsal, using long-term memory, place-keeping and organizational strategie

Teaching telecommunication standards: bridging the gap between theory and practice

©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Telecommunication standards have become a reliable mechanism to strengthen collaboration between industry and research institutions to accelerate the evolution of communications systems. Standards are needed to enable cooperation while promoting competition. Within the framework of a standard, the companies involved in the standardization process contribute and agree on appropriate technical specifications to ensure diversity and compatibility, and facilitate worldwide commercial deployment and evolution. Those parts of the system that can create competitive advantages are intentionally left open in the specifications. Such specifications are extensive, complex, and minimalistic. This makes telecommunication standards education a difficult endeavor, but it is much demanded by industry and governments to spur economic growth. This article describes a methodology for teaching wireless communications standards. We define our methodology around six learning stages that assimilate the standardization process and identify key learning objectives for each. Enabled by software-defined radio technology, we describe a practical learning environment that facilitates developing many of the needed technical and soft skills without the inherent difficulty and cost associated with radio frequency components and regulation. Using only open source software and commercial of-the-shelf computers, this environment is portable and can easily be recreated at other educational institutions and adapted to their educational needs and constraints. We discuss our and our students' experiences when employing the proposed methodology to 4G LTE standard education at Barcelona Tech.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Autism Toolbox : An Autism Resource for Scottish Schools

The Autism Toolbox will draw upon a range of practice experience, literature and research to offer guidance for authorities and schools providing for children and young people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)

The role of word frequency and morpho-orthography in agreement processing

Agreement attraction in comprehension (when an ungrammatical verb is read quickly if preceded by a feature-matching local noun) is well described by a cue-based retrieval framework. This suggests a role for lexical retrieval in attraction. To examine this, we manipulated two probabilistic factors known to affect lexical retrieval: local noun word frequency and morpho-orthography (agreement morphology realised with or without –s endings) in a self-paced reading study. Noun number and word frequency affected noun and verb region reading times, with higher-frequency words not eliciting attraction. Morpho-orthography impacted verb processing but not attraction: atypical plurals led to slower verb reading times regardless of verb number. Exploratory individual difference analyses further underscore the importance of lexical retrieval dynamics in sentence processing. This provides evidence that agreement operates via a cue-based retrieval mechanism over lexical representations that vary in their strength and association to number features

Synergies between processing and memory in children's reading span.

Previous research has established the relevance of working memory for cognitive development. Yet the factors responsible for shaping performance in the complex span tasks used to assess working memory capacity are not fully understood. We report a study of reading span in 7- to 11-year old children that addresses several contemporary theoretical issues. We demonstrate that both the timing and the accuracy of recall are affected by the presence or absence of a semantic connection between the processing requirement and the memoranda. Evidence that there can be synergies between processing and memory argues against the view that complex span simply measures the competition between these activities. We also demonstrate a consistent relationship between the rate of completing processing operations (sentence reading) and recall accuracy. At the same time, the shape and strength of this function varies with the task configuration. Taken together, these results demonstrate the potential for reconstructive influences to shape working memory performance among children

Administrative support staff in schools : ways forward

The aims of the research were to establish: • the impact of administrative support in school; • how teachers employ any time released by the presence of extra administrative support; • how the effective use of administrative support, including teacher time released, can best be used to support pupil attainment

Visual to auditory silent matching task in adults who do and do not stutter

textThe purpose of the present study was to investigate the role of phonological working memory in adults who do and do not stutter through a visual to auditory silent matching task. This task also explored the possible relationship between auditory processing and its ability to affect performance on the task. Participants were 13 adults who stutter (mean age = 28 years), matched in age, gender, handedness, and education level with 13 adults who do not stutter (mean age = 28 years). For the nonvocal visual to auditory task, participants silently read an initial target nonword and matched that target nonword to four subsequent auditory nonword choices. The participants completed this task for 4- syllable and 7- syllable nonwords (N = 8 per set). Results indicated that adults who stutter were significantly less accurate than adults who do not stutter at both syllable lengths. Our present findings support previous research that suggests less efficient phonological working memory in adults who stutter.Communication Sciences and Disorder