What is Working Memory, and Why is it Important?

Working memory is like the brain’s workspace. Imagine a brain as if it were a person. The job of that person is to manage the information coming in, organize it, and respond to it. Imagine that this person is sitting at a desk. Whatever they can fit on that desk is what they can pay attention to at any given time.  This desk is their working memory. When reading, they need to fit information about the letters and spelling patterns, the sounds those spellings refer to, the meanings of the words, the context of the story, on the desk.  Having a deficit in auditory working memory is like having a very small desk. You clear some space for the first sound, then the second sound, etc but by the time you get to the 4th or 5th sound you run out of room. Anything else you put on the desk is going to push something off. When kids try to blend the sounds in a word and come up with a word that doesn’t match the sounds they said, or often begins with the most recent sound they said, what’s happening is that they overwhelmed their working memory and couldn’t hold onto the earlier parts of the word.  They got pushed right off the metaphorical desk.

This is the main reason that we care about reading fluency.  Even for kids that do not have a working memory deficit, if decoding is not incredibly automatic, decoding takes up too much working memory for kids to comprehend the text, even if they can sound out the words.  

So what do we do if a child has a working memory challenge?  How do we teach a kid how to read if they struggle to keep all the sounds in a word “on their desk”?  The answer is, LOTS of repetition and time.  A kid with a working memory deficit will need more time and repetitions with a skill in order for it to become automatic.  The more skills that can be automated, the less working memory will be required to complete the task.  The end goal of decoding instruction is to free up as much working memory as possible for complex language comprehension.  The same holds true for spelling, and written composition (grammar, capitalization, etc).  We want as many of the “rules” of reading and writing to be automatic so that kids can use their working memory for more complex tasks.  

Does this sound like someone you know?  Feel free to reach out if you have questions, we are happy to help!

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