Working Memory and Inference Generation Part 2

Classroom Indicators of a Working Memory Disability

Working memory disabilities are often misidentified as reading comprehension disabilities. Reading comprehension disabilities manifest in academic achievement at a slower rate than a student's peers despite systematic and sequential instruction. A reading comprehension disability results in limited or poor literal comprehension (the student reads the paragraph or story and is then asked questions based on it); inferential comprehension (the student reads a paragraph or story and must interpret what has been read); listening comprehension (the student is read a paragraph or story and is then asked questions about what has been read); critical comprehension (the student reads a paragraph or story and then analyzes, evaluates, or makes judgments about what he or she has read); affective comprehension (the student reads a paragraph or story, and evaluates his or her emotional responses to the text); lexical comprehension (the student reads a paragraph or story, and assesses his or her knowledge of vocabulary words).

Working memory disabilities in the classroom are found in students who rarely volunteer answers and, sometimes, not answering direct questions; behave as though they have not paid attention, for example forgetting part or all of instructions or reading passages; do not see tasks through to completion; frequently lose their place in complicated comprehension tasks that they may eventually abandon; forget the content of reading passages and instructions; make poor academic progress during the school year, particularly in the areas of reading, writing, and mathematics; and are considered by their teachers to have short attention spans and also to be easily distracted.

Educators may understandably confuse a working memory disability with a reading comprehension disability and intervene accordingly. The risks of ineffective or inappropriate instructional interventions are numerous: a student falls even further behind their peers; remediation becomes more difficult and time consuming; or a student loses academic confidence and self-esteem. A student with a working memory disability is unable to meet the memory demands of a particular academic task. When this occurs, information that is critical and crucial to the successful completion of a task is lost to the student because of this information processing constraint.

Neuropsychologists agree that working memory is not a unitary entity that occurs in one area of the brain. A profile of a student's working memory through a comprehensive evaluation is a must to determine targeted accommodations, modifications, and interventions.

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