Work­ing mem­ory is the abil­ity to hold infor­ma­tion in your head and

Pic: Flickr (Plasticinaa)

manip­u­late it men­tally. You use this men­tal work­space when adding up two num­bers spo­ken to you by some­one else with­out being able to use pen and paper or a cal­cu­la­tor. Chil­dren at school need this mem­ory on a daily basis for a vari­ety of tasks such as fol­low­ing teach­ers’ instruc­tions or remem­ber­ing sen­tences they have been asked to write down.

The main goal of our recent paper pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Exper­i­men­tal Child Psy­chol­ogy was to inves­ti­gate the pre­dic­tive power of work­ing mem­ory and IQ in learn­ing in typ­i­cally devel­op­ing chil­dren over a six-year period. This issue is impor­tant because dis­tin­guish­ing between the cog­ni­tive skills under­pin­ning suc­cess in learn­ing is cru­cial for early screen­ing and intervention.

In this study, typ­i­cally devel­op­ing stu­dents were tested for their IQ and work­ing mem­ory at 5 years old and again when they were 11 years old. They were also tested on their aca­d­e­mic attain­ments in read­ing, spelling and maths.

Find­ings and Edu­ca­tional Implications

The find­ings revealed that a child’s suc­cess in all aspects of learn­ing is down to how good their work­ing mem­ory is regard­less of IQ score. Crit­i­cally, work­ing mem­ory at the start of for­mal edu­ca­tion is a more pow­er­ful pre­dic­tor of sub­se­quent aca­d­e­mic suc­cess than IQ in the early years.

This unique find­ing is impor­tant as it addresses Read the rest of this entry »

We often hear (gladly!) how teach­ers use our blog arti­cles and brain teasers in their classes. We also hear how many psy­chol­ogy and biol­ogy teach­ers are get­ting their stu­dents excited about brain research, and, to con­tribute to their efforts, we like to rec­og­nize some great initiatives.

Last year, Jef­frey Gonce, a Psy­chol­ogy teacher at Red Land High School (West Shore School Dis­trict, PA) asked his stu­dents to “com­plete a project describ­ing a recent brain (or genetic) study that affects behav­ior.” The stu­dents could opt to post their arti­cles online, and Jef­frey was kind enough to send us a link to read the results. We enjoyed read­ing them all, and pub­lished in our blog this beau­ti­ful essay, titled “Tis bet­ter to give than receive”, writ­ten by Alexan­dra, which was sub­se­quently included in a num­ber of neu­ro­science an psy­chol­ogy blogs.

This year, Jef­frey also sent us his stu­dents’ essays, and we are going to rec­og­nize and pub­lish this great essay by high school stu­dent Megan. Enjoy!
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It has long been the source of sci­en­tific debate as to whether music can improve the cog­ni­tive processes in chil­dren. Referred to by some as “The Mozart Effect,” a strong Read the rest of this entry »

TED Con­fer­ence, a great annual con­fer­ence on any­thing and every­thing new and mean­ing­ful, announces the pub­lic launch of their revamped web­site with great con­tent and social net­work­ing tools, all under the ban­ner “Ideas worth spreading”.

You can exer­cise your mind by learn­ing about most sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy sub­jects through won­der­ful TEDTalks video clips. Some examples:

• a few pre­sen­ta­tions on the theme How the Mind Works
• Bill Clin­ton
• E.O. Wil­son
• Barry Schwartz on the para­dox of choice

and many many more.