Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Writing about working memory has been on my to-do list for a long time. In my dual roles as a public school reading specialist and a private dyslexia therapist, I frequently encounter students with a wide range of cognitive profiles. While some students present with mild focus concerns, others face much more profound working memory difficulties. 

To better serve this population, I read and reread numerous clinical books during my preparation for dyslexia therapy certification. This extensive research confirmed that working memory has a profound impact on a child’s ability to learn to read and write. Ultimately, providing targeted intervention is always my main goal because the more severe a student’s memory deficit, the more challenging reading remediation becomes. 

Why Working Memory Matters for Academic Success

To appreciate this challenge, we must first understand why working memory is so vital for overall learning. In the foundational text Make It Stick, Brown et al. (2014) stated it best: “… to be useful, learning requires memory, so what we’ve learned is still there later when we need it” (p. 2). Essentially, working memory holds short-term information actively in the mind so it can be readily accessed for immediate use. 

Unquestionably, when this cognitive system is compromised, it immediately disrupts a student’s daily classroom performance. For instance, common working memory problems include chronic inattentiveness, forgetfulness, and severe difficulty following basic directions (Dehn, 2015). 

In Essentials of Working Memory Assessment and Intervention, Dehn (2015, p. 3) provided a list of everyday instructional activities that are heavily impacted by working memory deficits:

• Keeping track of one’s place while counting.
• Remembering multistep directions that were just presented or read.
• Comprehending what is being said or read.
• Remembering what one was going to do next.
• Noticing errors that are contained in a written sentence one just produced.
• Keeping up with the flow of a conversation and remembering what one was going to say. 

The Hidden Challenge of Working Memory in Reading Instruction

Despite its significance, this barrier happens without fail every single school year, as I always work with students who struggle deeply in this area. Unfortunately, this internal deficit is usually not apparent during initial casual interactions. Instead, I typically notice these specific working memory gaps later during intensive reading and spelling practice.

Furthermore, we must look at what working memory actually does during complex literacy tasks to understand why these breakdowns occur. Specifically, a reader must use sound-symbol correspondence to identify the letter sounds in a word, and then immediately blend those sounds together to successfully decode the entire word. 

While young children are typically able to hold three to four items in their mind at once, students with dyslexia and related learning disabilities are often only able to hold two sounds simultaneously. As a result, standard teaching paces quickly overwhelm their processing limits.

Why Spelling Highlights Working Memory Failures

Our standard spelling routine perfectly highlights this exact memory bottleneck. During typical spelling exercises, my students repeat a target word and then segment its individual sounds. However, those with working memory deficits struggle significantly to remember the third or fourth sound in sequence.

Consequently, they require me to repeat the word multiple times just so they can hold onto the phonemes long enough to identify the next sequential sound.

In addition to spelling barriers, we see an identical struggle when students attempt to decode complex words during reading instruction.

For instance, this frequently happens when a student attempts to read a word with four to five letters containing consonant blends, such as CCVCC or CVCCC structures like splint or flask. Even though the student has all of the letters directly in front of them, they are physically unable to hold the sounds of each grapheme in their mind. Therefore, they cannot retain them long enough to blend them into a recognizable word. Ultimately, they give up under the stressful cognitive demand and resort to blind guessing.

Supporting Working Memory During Reading Intervention

Given these massive hurdles, how can teachers and specialists successfully support weak working memory during an intensive reading intervention? Fortunately, targeted scaffolding can bypass these cognitive bottlenecks.

1. Reduce Cognitive Load with Visuals: First, teachers can significantly reduce a student’s immediate cognitive load by providing explicit picture prompts during a lesson. For example, my consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) dice games use vivid pictures to reduce the mental storage required for segmenting.
2. Scaffold Phonemic Awareness: In order to segment a basic CVC word, a student must say the word and hold each individual sound in their mind. Because many memory-blocked students still forget the final sound and resort to incorrect guessing, tasks must be heavily scaffolded with tactile or visual anchors to track each sound.

By intentionally lowering the memory demands of the task, we allow students with dyslexia to focus their limited mental energy on processing sounds and letters, paving a much smoother path toward reading success.

Continuing the Journey

This blog post was just a brief introduction to working memory, which remains a vast and deeply complicated neurological topic. To develop a much deeper understanding of working memory and how it directly affects unique individuals, I invite you to continue your reading journey using the curated textbook resources outlined below.

Working Memory Recommended Reading

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Belknap Press.

Dehn, M. J. (2008). Working memory and academic learning: Assessment and intervention. John Wiley & Sons. [21, 22, 23]

Gathercole, S. E., & Alloway, T. P. (2008). Working memory and learning: A practical guide for teachers. SAGE Publications. [24]

Pickering, S. J. (Ed.). (2006). Working memory and education. Academic Press.

Also Read

How to Help Your Child Master Letters: Effective Mnemonic Strategies

Help My Child Learn to Read!

References

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Harvard University Press.

Dehn, M. J. (2015). Essentials of working memory assessment and intervention. John Wiley & Sons. 

About the Therapist

Bridget Anderson, M.A., CALT, C-SLDS provides expert dyslexia therapy for elementary students in the Fontana and Rancho Cucamonga, CA communities.