I am pleased to introduce you to our latest guest writer, working memory expert, Dr Tracy Packiam Alloway. Tracy is a psychologist, author and consultant with a specialism in working memory.
Working memory is described ‘as the part of short-term memory which is concerned with immediate conscious perceptual and linguistic processing’.
| Dr Tracy Packiam Alloway |
Tracy explores the links between having dyslexia and working memory ability from childhood to adult.
Tracy writes…
There is a shift in the deficits
driving reading difficulties from childhood to adulthood. While children with
dyslexia find it hard to process the sounds of the word, adults with
dyslexia struggled more with integrating the sounds with the meanings of the
words.
There is great heterogeneity in
the adult dyslexic profile. In some cases, there can be a working memory
deficit, while other dyslexic adults may not even show any evidence of
working memory deficits. For example, in my research I compared working memory skills of college
students with reading difficulties and those normal reading skills.
Here are some of the findings that
college students can use to support study habits:
• Adults with dyslexia did not exhibit
poor verbal working memory skills.
It is possible that these adults
did not demonstrate any working memory deficits because they had developed
their phonological skills well enough to not require working memory. However,
it may be more efficient to rely on your strengths in visual memory to maximize
your study time.
• Adults with dyslexia used their
strengths in visual working memory to maintain attention to a task.
Study tips:
Visualize
the information as you read it
Make
sure the information is written down rather than relying on your memory of it
Report
the information in a visually interesting manner, using images of graphs
Additional classroom strategies to
support working memory in the classroom for the student with dyslexia can be
found in Understanding Working Memory
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