she found that poor working memory can result in reading problems, as well as difficulty with arithmetic and computation.
British psychologist Rebecca Bull echoed this finding with British students and found that if students have poor working memory, they have lower mathematical ability because they are not able to process and work with all the necessary numerical information. Their poor working memory skills also mean that they find it difficult to integrate different mathematical concepts, something that is commonly required in solving word problems.
In the United States, psychologist David Geary at the University of Missouri–Columbia has spent nearly a decade investigating the importance of working memory in math skills. In one of his many studies, he followed children from kindergarten to fifth grade and found that those who struggled most in math had lower working memory scores compared to their schoolmates.
A wealth of research also points to working memory as the most important cognitive skill in language acquisition. Researchers from the University of California studied high school students over three years and identified working memory as the key skill that determined success in reading and comprehension. Adding to these findings are numerous studies from Susan Ellis Weismer and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Weismer’s work shows that working memory is critical for learning grammar as well as new vocabulary words. In her studies, the students typically have average IQ skills but poor working memory, so they offer an ideal opportunity to disentangle the contribution of working memory to learning from what IQ can offer.
Weismer has reported that even if students have average IQ skills, their poor working memory makes it hard to learn new words and remember the grammatical rules. In particular, she has found that people with average IQ but poor working memory have more difficulty learning if the information is presented quickly.
Tracy’s contributions to the growing body of evidence on working memory and learning skills include another study in which she compared the IQ and working memory scores in six- to eleven-year-olds. In this study, she found a causal relationship between working memory and language (reading, writing, and comprehension) and math skills. The strength of the children’s working memory determined how well they would do in these subjects.
With the evidence from Tracy and other researchers mounting, it has become crystal clear: if we want to know how well students will perform in the classroom, we need to look at their working memory.
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