World-Bank

Next: Harnessing information and communications technology (ICT) to address mental health challenges affecting 700 million people today

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Global mental healthMak­ing Men­tal Health a Glob­al Pri­or­i­ty (The Dana Foundation):

“Who hasn’t felt a sense of loss or detach­ment from our fam­i­lies, friends, and reg­u­lar rou­tines, or expe­ri­enced ner­vous­ness and anx­i­ety about changes in our per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives? [Read more…] about Next: Har­ness­ing infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) to address men­tal health chal­lenges affect­ing 700 mil­lion peo­ple today

10% Students may have working memory problems: Why does it matter?

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Work­ing mem­o­ry is our abil­i­ty to store and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion for a brief time. It is typ­i­cal­ly mea­sured by dual-tasks, where the indi­vid­ual has to remem­ber an item while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly pro­cess­ing a some­times unre­lat­ed piece of infor­ma­tion. A wide­ly used work­ing mem­o­ry task is the read­ing span task where the indi­vid­ual reads a sen­tence, ver­i­fies it, and then recalls the final word. Indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences in work­ing mem­o­ry per­for­mance are close­ly relat­ed to a range of aca­d­e­m­ic skills such as read­ing, spelling, com­pre­hen­sion, and math­e­mat­ics. Cru­cial­ly, there is emerg­ing research that work­ing mem­o­ry pre­dicts learn­ing out­comes inde­pen­dent­ly of IQ. One expla­na­tion for the impor­tance of work­ing mem­o­ry in aca­d­e­m­ic attain­ment is that because it appears to be rel­a­tive­ly unaf­fect­ed by envi­ron­men­tal influ­ences, such as parental edu­ca­tion­al lev­el and finan­cial back­ground, it mea­sures a student’s capac­i­ty to acquire knowl­edge rather than what they have already learned.

How­ev­er lit­tle is known about the con­se­quences of low work­ing mem­o­ry capac­i­ty per se, inde­pen­dent of oth­er asso­ci­at­ed learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties. In par­tic­u­lar, it is not known either what pro­por­tion of stu­dents with low work­ing mem­o­ry capac­i­ties has sig­nif­i­cant learn­ing dif­fi­cul­ties or what their behav­ioral char­ac­ter­is­tics are. The aim of a recent study pub­lished in Child Devel­op­ment (ref­er­ence below) was to pro­vide the first sys­tem­at­ic large-scale exam­i­na­tion of the cog­ni­tive and behav­ioral char­ac­ter­is­tics of school-aged stu­dents who have been iden­ti­fied sole­ly on the basis of very low work­ing mem­o­ry scores.

In screen­ing of over 3000 school-aged stu­dents in main­stream schools, 1 in 10 was iden­ti­fied as hav­ing work­ing mem­o­ry dif­fi­cul­ties. There were sev­er­al key find­ings regard­ing their cog­ni­tive skills. The first is that the major­i­ty of them per­formed below age-expect­ed lev­els in read­ing and math­e­mat­ics. This sug­gests that [Read more…] about 10% Stu­dents may have work­ing mem­o­ry prob­lems: Why does it matter?