Yearly Archives: 2021

“I Remembered Not to Forget!” How to Improve Working Memory in Children

By ADDitude Editors, Chris Zeigler Dendy, M.S. Updated on July 26, 2021

If complex instructions or information fly easily out of your child’s mind, use these in-school and at-home tips to reduce the nagging and improve his working memory.

Working memory is the ability to hold information in mind while performing complex tasks. A young child is able to execute simple tasks — sharpen his pencil when asked — while one in middle school can remember the expectations of multiple teachers.

Since students with attention deficit disorder (ADD or ADHD) and learning disabilities often have problems with short-term memory, it is important to reduce the amount of routine information they must remember. Keeping their memory free for the key part of the task in front of them is essential.

Parents and teachers can help students with ADHD develop strategies for remembering more, and — most importantly — routinely using the strategies they came up with.

How to Improve Working Memory in Children at School

Put homework assignments in writing. Write each assignment on the blackboard in the same place every day, so that students know where to find it. Kids with ADHD may not be listening or paying attention when you give them oral instructions — and you can’t rely on them to always remember instructions.

Make checklists. One way to reduce memory demands is to provide your class with a list of the steps required to complete an assignment. The instructions should be brief.

Find out what they heard. Have students with weak working memory repeat assignment instructions and clarify any parts that they may have forgotten.

Make time at the end of class for students to write down homework in their assignment books. Make sure the kids with ADHD are doing what you’ve asked. Fun, visual reminders can also help. For an essay assignment, for instance, have each student trace her hand on a piece of paper and then write the name of one part of the essay in each finger: thesis statement, topic sentences for the first, second, and third paragraph, and conclusion.

Make eye contact with a child before giving him a classroom assignment.

Keep homework assignments on the school website up-to-date. Parents of kids with ADHD depend on this information to make sure their kids know what to do.

Speak slowly and provide information in small units. Given too much information at once, a child with weak working memory quickly loses track. She may still be working through the first few minutes of the lesson after you’ve moved on.

Make lectures interactive. To get kids with weak working memory to remember something important, structure the lecture to include responses from them. For instance, when teaching a math lesson, you might encourage students to volunteer to share what they learned about fractions, division, or whatever material was covered that day. Repeating a key point will help anchor it in their memories.

Use wild and wacky strategies. Presenting information in a typical fashion may not grab a student’s attention, but a curve ball can help grasp it for better recall later.

Use brain breaks or movement and exercise. Exercise increases blood flow to the brain and helps students think more clearly. So, rather than have students raise their hands to answer, you can have them do jumping jacks by their chairs. You can also encourage movement by letting kids walk to the water fountain for a break.

Have a routine for handing in homework assignments. Some teachers ask students to place their completed work on their desk as soon as they sit down for class — and then check off in their grade books that the homework was done. Another idea: Make handing in homework the “ticket to get out of class” at the end of the day. Stand by the door and collect it as the students leave. As you can imagine, kids will comply when the alternative is having to stay in school one minute longer.

Talk with students about what to do if they forget something. Assign — or ask students to select — a study buddy they can talk with if they’ve forgotten what they’re supposed to do for homework or can’t remember what to do in class.

Use an analog clock during lessons to help your students with time management. They will be able to keep track of how much time has passed and how much remains.

Call close attention to due dates and key concepts. Post them, refer to them frequently, and remind parents and students in notes home, newsletters, or school voicemail. For essential themes delivered when instructing, use cues like, “This is important!” It also helps to frame important information with numbers i.e. “Remember 5 things.”

Ask students to design their own “tickler systems” — ways to remind themselves of things they must remember (permission slips, lunch money, gym clothes). This could lead to a class discussion, to give students a chance to share the strategies that work for them.

How to Improve Working Memory at Home

Assign a designated place for your child to put important stuff — house keys, wallet, sports equipment. As soon as he gets home from school, make sure he puts those things where they belong. A reward for following through — or a penalty for not — will reinforce the habit of staying organized.

Create a reminder checklist to make sure your child has everything she needs to bring to school. In the beginning, watch as she goes through the checklist, to make sure she’s putting every item in her backpack. Do not repeat what’s on the list, but ask her to tell you (this helps to transfer the information from your working memory to hers). Have your child use the checklist when she finishes her homework the night before, to avoid rushing around in the morning.

Make, and use, to-do lists yourself, so that your child sees this is a lifelong coping strategy. Life is too complicated to expect kids to commit everything to memory!

Brainstorm with your child about ways he can remember important things. Can he write it on the back of his hand, program his smartphone to remind him, ask friends with better memories to prompt him?

Homework Routines to Improve Working Memory

Get permission from teachers for your child to e-mail her assignments. This is easy for kids who do homework on the computer. Some families scan the homework on a scanner and e-mail it to the teacher. This tip won’t strengthen working memory, but it’s a good coping strategy for students with weak executive function.

Reward your child for remembering. E-mail teachers once a week to make sure all the homework was handed in. Give your child five points for all homework turned in, four points for missing only one assignment, and no points if he misses more than one. Create a menu of rewards the child can earn. Allot more points for more complex assignments.

Give your child a homework routine to follow. Homework is a complex series of subtasks that must be completed in sequential order. It requires plenty of working memory. Teach your child that, in order to complete a homework assignment, he must:

• Know what the assignment is

• Record the assignment

• Bring the required materials home

• Do the homework

• Return the homework to his bookbag or backpack

• Bring the completed homework to school.

Morning Routines to Improve Working Memory

Have your child tape-record the steps of his morning routine. Listening to his own voice on playback creates less tension than your nagging him about what to do. If he forgets a step, he can just rewind the tape to figure out what he missed.

Rehearse with your child what you expect him to remember right before the situation. For example, if he needs to ask the teacher for a study guide or one-on-one help, prep him by asking, “So, what do you need to say to your teacher when you go up to her desk?”

Use digital reminders. With children in middle school, use cell phones, text messages, or instant messages to remind them of things they have to do.

Keep external distractions to a minimum — turn off the TV or turn down the volume if you want your child’s full attention when you’re saying something important.

Follow through. Children with weak working memory will indicate that they did something — put their homework in their backpack, say — when you ask, but will proceed to forget. Until the child gets used to taking action when prompted, check on him to make sure he did what he told you.

**Article from ADDitude

6 Things You Didn’t Know About the ADHD Brain

Two top ADHD experts explain how the attention deficit brain works — and, in some cases, why it doesn’t always work at its best.

How do stimulants work in the ADHD brain?

Stimulation is an easily measured feature of the first-line stimulant medications, but it is not clear that stimulation is how and why they work for attention deficit disorder (ADHD or ADD). There are 43 medications currently available that stimulate in the same way that amphetamine and methylphenidate do, but only three of those medications make ADHD better. The rest make it worse. Just being a stimulant is not enough to make a medication work in an ADHD brain.

A PET scan study was done monitoring a specially prepared solution of methylphenidate to see where it wound up in the human brain. Everyone expected that it would go to somewhere in the fronto-parietal cortex, or to some area that was rich in adrenaline or dopamine nerves. It didn’t. Instead, it was actively pulled out of the blood and concentrated in only one area at the exact center of the brain called the corpus striatum.

The striatum has no adrenaline or dopamine activity. The striatum is your executive assistant. It scans all of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences and sends the one most important thing up to your cortex for you to think about. Everything else is handled behind the scenes.

The current theory of ADHD is that the striatum works 99 percent as well as it does in neurotypical brains. Rather than sending only one important thing to the frontal cortex, it sends five or six things, with no particular significance attached to any one of them. This is what it is like to have untreated ADHD — five things rumbling about in your head for no apparent reason. The ADHD medications help the striatum work the way it was meant to. —William Dodson, M.D.

Are stimulants safe for the ADHD brain?

Many years ago, people had unfounded fears about the long-term effects on the brain of taking stimulant-class medications every day for a lifetime. We know the answer. The first data come from the use of stimulants for the treatment of a sleep disorder called narcolepsy. Reviews of people who have taken the same medications that are used to treat ADHD every day for 40 to 50 years did not find a single long-term problem. The longest study of ADHD is the Milwaukee Study, now about 28 years old. Thus far, all of the risk of ADHD has been associated with not treating the condition with medication, not with medication treatment itself. —William Dodson, MD

 Why don’t methylphenidate or amphetamine work for me or my child?

Through the years, it has been recognized that the right molecule at the right dose for the unique individual child or adult should have dramatic benefits, with essentially no side effects. However, many parents found that their child did not tolerate or benefit from taking the two stimulant medications, methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta, and so on) and amphetamine (Adderall, Vyvanse, and so on). We now know why.

It turns out that the dosage ranges approved by the FDA for the first-line stimulant medications work for only about half of patients. Between six to eight percent of people get their optimal response at doses lower than the lowest doses manufactured. If these patients start at the very lowest dose available, they are already overdosed and experience the Zombie syndrome (emotional blunting, lethargy) or the Starbuck’s syndrome (being too revved up, having a rapid heart rate, becoming irritable). The patients do fine when they take lower doses.

Conversely, about 40 percent of people get their optimal response at doses higher than the highest strengths approved by the FDA. They try medication, but they don’t get to a dose that gives them dramatic benefits. The recognition of a wider range of optimal doses has resulted in better medication response for up to half of patients. —William Dodson, M.D.

Why does the ADHD brain lose interest in tasks?

PET imaging studies of brains in people diagnosed with ADHD demonstrate that chemicals that activate reward-recognizing circuits in the brain tend to bind on significantly fewer receptor sites in people with ADHD than do those in a healthy comparison group. These and other imaging studies may help explain why people with ADHD tend to be less able than their peers to anticipate pleasure or register satisfaction with tasks for which the payoff is delayed. An important effect is that they have great difficulty in activating themselves to get started on tasks that are not especially interesting to them and in sustaining motivation to complete tasks for which the rewards are not imminently available. —Thomas E. Brown, Ph.D., from his book Smart But Stuck

Why is the ADHD brain often swamped by emotion?

There are two primary ways in which emotions play a critical role in the chronic difficulties of people with ADHD. Both are related to working memory impairments—the person’s limited capacity to keep in mind and use multiple bits of emotion-laden information at the same time. Sometimes the working memory impairments of the ADHD brain allow a momentary emotion to become too strong; the person is flooded with one emotion and unable to attend to other emotions, facts, and memories relevant to that memory.

At other times, the working memory impairments of ADHD leave the person with insufficient sensitivity to the importance of a particular emotion because he or she hasn’t kept other relevant information sufficiently in mind, or factored it into his or her assessment of the situation. —Thomas. E. Brown, Ph.D., from his book Smart But Stuck

Why doesn’t the ADHD brain always make the connection?

The networks that carry information related to emotion and other aspects of brain functioning tend to be somewhat more limited in individuals with ADHD compared to most others. Years ago, most scientists thought that impairments of ADHD were due primarily to problems within specific regions of the brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex. New technologies, however, have shown that some of the impairments of people with ADHD may be more related to networks of fibers that support interactive communication between various regions of the brain. One type of communication between brain regions occurs via connections referred to as “white matter.” Imaging studies have shown abnormalities in the structure of white matter in brains of children, adolescents, and adults with ADHD.

Such abnormalities may explain some of the difficulties these individuals have — keeping one thing in mind while doing something else. One study has shown that methylphenidate, used to treat ADHD, can normalize the connectivity limitations in the motivation and reward networks of children with ADHD when they are performing some assigned tasks. —Thomas E. Brown, Ph.D., from his book Smart But Stuck

Courtesy of ADDitude magazine