How to Improve Working Memory in Children

Working memory is how much a child can hold in mind while doing something with it. It is small in young children, grows into adolescence, and is the bottleneck almost every school task runs through, which is why so much of what looks like carelessness is actually a capacity running out mid-task.

What it explains

Once you know what working memory is, a set of familiar frustrations stop looking like attitude.

• The child who goes upstairs and returns with nothing
• The child who does the first part of an instruction and stops
• The child who can read every word in a sentence but cannot say what it meant
• The child who loses their place in a sum halfway through
• The child who forgets what they were going to say mid-sentence

None of these is a failure of effort. In each one the information has simply dropped out before the task was finished.

Forgetting the second half of an instruction is not defiance. The second half was never held.

Reduce the load before trying to raise the capacity

The capacity grows slowly, on its own timetable. The load, on the other hand, can be changed today, and doing so produces an immediate improvement in what a child can complete.

• One instruction at a time. The single highest-value change. Four steps become four separate asks, each after the last is done.
• Put it outside the head. A written list, pictures on the wall, a note on the door. Anything on paper is something that does not have to be held.
• Ask them to say it back. Not as a test. As a way of moving it from hearing into holding.
• Automate what can be automated. Number facts and letter sounds that are fully fluent take up no working memory. Time spent making the basics automatic frees capacity for the actual thinking, which is why fluency practice matters more than it looks.
• Cut the background. Noise and visual clutter consume the same resource the task needs.
• Give thinking time. Waiting five seconds after a question, without filling the silence, is often all that is needed.

Activities that load it directly

These are games rather than training, and they should be played because they are good games.

• Memory pairs, building up the number of cards
• "I went to the shop and I bought…", each player adding an item
• Following two- and three-step directions in a made-up game
• Mental arithmetic held aloud rather than written
• Retelling a story in the right order
• Learning songs, poems and shlokas by heart

The honest limits

Working memory training has been studied a great deal, and the finding has been consistent and disappointing: children get better at the trained task, and that improvement does not transfer to reading, maths or classroom behaviour. Programmes sold on the promise of transfer are selling something the evidence does not support.

What does help is unremarkable. Sleep, which affects working memory measurably; physical activity; reducing load; and building fluency in the basics so less has to be held at once.

Design around the capacity rather than trying to expand it. That is where the gains actually are.