Working Memory- A Classroom Need

Working memory plays an important role in supporting children’s learning over the school years, and beyond this into adulthood. Working memory is crucially required to store information while other material is being mentally manipulated during the classroom learning activities that form the foundations for the acquisition of complex skills and knowledge. A child with a poor working memory capacity will struggle and often fail in such activities, disrupting and delaying learning.

Working memory is the term used to refer to a system responsible for temporarily storing and manipulating information. It functions as a mental workspace that can be flexibly used to support everyday cognitive activities that require both processing and storage such as, mental arithmetic. However, the capacity of working memory is limited, and the imposition of either excess storage or processing demands in the course of an on-going cognitive activity will lead to great loss of information from this temporary memory system.

A good example of an everyday activity that uses working memory is mental arithmetic. Imagine, for example, attempting to multiply two numbers (e.g., 43, 27) spoken to you by another person, without being able to use a pen and paper or a calculator. First of all, you would need to hold the two numbers in working memory. The next step would be to use learned multiplication rules to calculate the products of successive pairs of numbers, adding to working memory the new products as you proceed. Finally, you would need to add the products held in working memory, resulting in the correct solution.

To do this successfully, it is necessary to store the two numbers, and then systematically apply multiplication rules, storing the intermediate products that are generated as we proceed through the stages of the calculation. Without working memory, we would not be able to carry out this kind of complex mental activity in which we have to both keep in mind some information while processing other materials. Carrying out such mental activities is a process that is effortful and error prone. A minor distraction such as an unrelated thought springing to mind or an interruption by someone else is likely to result in complete loss of the stored information, and so in a failed calculation attempt. As no amount of effort will allow us to remember again the lost information, the only course of action is to start the calculation afresh.

Our abilities to carry out such calculations are limited by the amount of information we have to store and process. Multiplying larger numbers (e.g., 142 and 891) “in our heads” is for most of us out of the question, even though it does not require greater mathematical knowledge than the earlier example. The reason we cannot do this is that the storage demands of the activity exceed the capacity of working memory.

Hence a deliberate attempt should be made for development of working memory among school going children.