Could supporting working memory reduce the attainment gap?
Working memory is just one of many factors impacting educational equality
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Mind, Brain, and Education
A child’s working memory capacity is linked to their school performance. Working memory – holding and manipulating information in the mind – has many roles in the classroom: It helps children keep track of and understand the meaning of a long sentence (Proust, anyone?), imagine the movement of electrons around an atom, and remember the steps in a mathematical operation.
Children who grow up in families facing social and economic disadvantage tend to have less working memory capacity than their more advantaged peers. On average, they have more difficulty keeping in mind and manipulating chunks of information. Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds also tend to achieve lower grades at school. We wondered whether this attainment gap could be linked to working memory. With our colleagues, we sought to find out.
Social inequalities in educational attainment and working memory
We analysed data from some 3,000 teenagers growing up in the Greater London area in England. These individuals were tested first when they were 11-12 years old and again when they were 13-15 years old. They completed short, computerised working memory tasks that required them to remember and recall either numbers or spatial locations after a few seconds.
As expected, in an earlier study, we found a gap in working memory capacity between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds. The new result was that the gap was wider in the second test when the participants were 2 years older.
We then obtained the students’ educational records from the government. At age 11, children take reading, writing, maths, and science tests. At the end of compulsory education at age 16, adolescents complete exams in English, maths, and science. Like for working memory, there was an educational achievement gap, with disadvantaged students achieving lower grades, and the gap widened as the children grew older. This growing achievement gap seems to be due in part to the widening gap in working memory capacity with age.
“This growing achievement gap seems to be due in part to the widening gap in working memory capacity with age.”
While studies often use a single measure of social and economic disadvantage, we wanted to consider separately the potential roles of parental education, parental occupation, income poverty, and area deprivation. Looking at these different factors, we found that variation in teenagers’ educational progress between ages 11 and 16 was linked to parental occupation, parental education, and family income poverty, but not to area deprivation. Accordingly, teenagers whose parents had gone to university, held white-collar or desk-based jobs, and were not living in poverty progressed the most at school. It could be that such parents provide their children with additional resources during adolescence, like visits to museums, books, tutoring, a quiet study space, or support with homework or time management, which promote their learning of school subjects.
We also found that the differences between children in educational progress that were linked to parental occupation and income poverty were in part associated with working memory development throughout adolescence. However, this wasn’t the case for differences linked to parental education levels. Families’ economic resources may therefore promote children’s cognitive development, which in turn impacts their school progress. More research is needed to uncover the origin of these links, but they may be related to a cognitively stimulating environment, reduced stress, and better nutrition over the course of adolescence.
These socioeconomics-related attainment gaps were not associated with speaking English as a second language, cultural factors, or differences in school quality.
Reducing social and economic disadvantage in the teenage years
Social and economic inequalities in educational attainment are present from the moment children start school, and increase as they move through the educational system in the UK. James J. Heckman received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work showing that investing in early skill development has particularly large economic and social benefits. However, while it is important to intervene early, that’s not enough. Adolescents are often overlooked in research and initiatives designed to combat educational inequalities. Social and economic background should be considered beyond the early years.
“Working memory is just one of a large set of factors that explain why students from socially and economically advantaged families progress the most during secondary school.”
Could teenagers from socioeconomically disadvantaged families benefit from working memory aids in school and from strategies to reduce their cognitive loads? Perhaps, but our study showed that no more than 17% of differences in educational progress were related to change in working memory. Working memory is just one of a large set of factors that explain why students from socially and economically advantaged families progress the most during secondary school. So while working memory supports in the classroom may help disadvantaged teens, they are unlikely to be a magic bullet or a quick remedy to entrenched educational inequalities.
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Mind, Brain, and Education
Footnotes
This article is based on the paper ‘Increasing social inequalities in educational attainment over adolescence follow increasing inequalities in working memory’ that was recently published in the journal Mind, Brain, and Education by Roisin C. Perry, Andrew Tolmie, Mireille B. Toledano, Chen Shen, Michael S. C. Thomas, and Iroise Dumontheil. The study described is The Study of Cognition, Adolescents and Mobile Phones Cohort.
The article is part of the Share Your Science series, a collaboration between BOLD and Mind, Brain, and Education. In the series, authors of articles published in Mind, Brain, and Education write an accompanying BOLD article to share their insights with a wider audience. Wiley and the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society co-own the journal Mind, Brain and Education.