Working Memory:How It Affects Learning
Imagine you are at Thanksgiving Dinner--and really hungry. However, you are given a dessert plate instead of a dinner plate. How are you going to get all that good food on a small plate? Someone tells you just to keep going back for more helpings. But you get confused--you cannot remember how much you have eaten or which of the dishes you tried.
Having a weakness in working memory is much like being given a dessert plate when you need a dinner plate. Cognitive psychologists contend that while we are solving problems, we use our working memories to manipulate the information. We are also accessing our short-term memory,using information we just read or were taught, and retrieving information from our long-term memory.
When a student solves a math problem, many items have to be held in the working memory. The student has to remember what the teacher just introduced in the lesson--information stored in his short term memory---and then, he has to retrieve math facts, procedures, and strategies from his long-term memory. Along with that, he has to remember to keep his work organized vertically and to write the numbers and signs accurately.
One researcher,University of Chicago psychologist Sian L. Beilock, conducted studies that show that students with excellent working memories can perform very poorly on math tests if the situation is too stressful.
Beilock also concluded that when problems are written horizontally (like word problems) students had more difficulty than they did when problems were presented vertically. The students used a great deal of working memory "translating" the horizontal to vertical. which required using verbal skills, and had less working memory available for the math.
Mark H. Ashcraft and Jeremy A. Krause at the University of Nevada, concluded that it is more difficult for a student to work a math problem that requires using the working memory than to complete math problems when the answer can be retrieved from long term memory. In other words, adding several numbers that will involve regrouping is more difficult than solving 6X9 because the fact is stored and easily retrieved.
Therefore, it makes sense why students like to memorize a procedure and start applying that procedure without "thinking." They trust their memories, but they are not so confident about their ability to reason through a problem. Students, especially students who struggle in math, spend little time setting up a problem or predicting an answer. They tend to start working a procedure they have memorized because this is how they have been successful.
NEXT: Working Memory or Attention: Which is More Important When Learning Math