WORKING MEMORY CHALLENGES: HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT YOUR STUDENTS

In my earlier post, I shared information teachers need to know about working memory. Now let’s look at ways you can support your students who struggle with short-term, or working, memory.

Teach in a way that helps students remember what you are teaching.

• Emphasize context and purpose. Ask yourself why students are being asked to memorize these facts in the first place. If students can readily answer that question and if they can picture future situations in which they will use the information, they will be better primed to remember it.
• Make sure students understand the material! It is very hard to memorize words without meaning. 
• Break down new vocabulary words, especially those that are more than two syllables long. Allow time to rehearse and remember the first couple of syllables before tacking on later ones. Also keep in mind that this process will be easier for some students than others due to wide variation in phonological loop capacity; you may want to design in a “mastery learning” or other individualized approach for vocabulary so that students can move at their own pace.
• Take advantage of the applied memory principles of testing spacing, and interleaving. Briefly, these refer to the facts that quizzes are a great way to study and that we do best when we spread out our study sessions and alternate between different topics. 

Directly teach specific memorization techniques.

• Use mnemonics such as words or sentences made of the first letters of the items in a list. Examples include HOMES for the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior); Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge to remember the notes on a musical staff; and PEMDAS for the order of operations in math (parenthesis, exponents, multiplication and division, and addition and subtraction).
  Sing it. Songs have been written to help students memorize information, such as lists of prepositions, the planets in the Solar System, and the names of the fifty United States.
• Draw it. A 2018 study shows drawing pictures to memorize is superior to activities such as reading or writing because it forces the person to process information in multiple ways: visually, kinesthetically, and semantically.1
• Play the “Eraser Game,” in which the sentence or list to be memorized is written out. Then one or two words on the list are erased, and the student reads the sentence or list, filling in the missing words. One or two more words are erased, and the student again reads the material, filling in all the missing words. This continues until everything is erased and the student can say everything that was originally written. (Alternatives to erasing: black out words with a marker, or put the information to memorize on a computer, and gradually replace words with random letters, such as “xxxx.”)
• Add motions and a beat to what needs to be memorized. Music and movement are both extremely helpful for memorization.
• Make flashcards to learn information in pairs, such as states and capitals or events and dates. Students should learn to look at one side of each flashcard and name the item on the other side. If correct, the flashcard can go onto a pile of memorized facts; if not, the flashcard goes to the bottom of the stack being learned. Continue until all the flashcards are in the “memorized” pile. Then flip the flashcards over and do the same thing starting with the other side of the cards.
  Say aloud what is being memorized, repeatedly until learned. This is called phonological looping.
• Use Cover-Copy-Compare. Look at the item to be memorized (such as a word’s spelling), cover it, write it, and then compare what was written to the original item.

Two more tips:

• Teach students to avoid the rereading trap. Students tend to fall into passively reviewing material, and in doing so they miss the key advantage of techniques such as testing: retrieval practice. Retrieval practice strengthens memory, but it works only when we actively challenge memory. Flash cards, a favorite student strategy, are fine as long as students use them to actively quiz themselves, rather than just looking at one side of the card and then the other, and then setting it aside.
• De-stress before memorizing. Stressed minds have a greatly reduced capacity to learn. Teach students to relax before memorizing. Classical music can help.

Students who struggle with working memory need to be taught memorization skills directly; they are not likely to pick up how to memorize and study through incidental learning. Remember that memorization, like other academic skills, can be taught—and learned!

1 https://hsredesign.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Impact-of-drawing-on-memory.pdf