[senco-forum] RE Short Term Memory Deficit

In any standard Word Recognition course, the strategies which a child develops to secure recognition are entirely up to the individual child - the teacher is involved only in the management of the programme. The point of such programmes (and there will be many)  is that the kind of focused experience of individual words of varying levels of complexity which the programmes provide, gives them a greater chance of being passed into long term memory where they can serve as the kind decoding reference library which all competent readers take have and use reflexively.

Such programmes generally, do not make any claim about improving short term memory function (although a small number apparently do) They simply proving a route by which words, using various re-enforement techniques, can apparently be punched through into longer term memory.

Those with short term memory deficits are said to retain visual images for a tiny fraction of a second only - the length of time being relative to the 'survival value' of the particular image.  If this is the case, it is easy to appreciate why 'text' would not rate very high on such a scale and why children with this form of deficit tend to be poor readers. It is interesting to note that they can excell in many other life-skills areas.

Certainly it is wrong to try to impose any particular learning strategy - in my experience that is something that is very difficult to do anyway. Children do rather tend to do their own thing when it comes to 'how' they learn.

Eddie C.