22 Jul Short Term Memory Disorder
Posted at 07:58h
in Learning Difficulties
What is Short Term Memory disorder (STM)?
STM also known as STAM (which stands for short term auditory memory span) is a memory disorder that involves problems recalling words, verbal items and language based memory.
Short term memory (or working memory) involves the ability to pay sufficient attention to information given and the ability to encode this information properly when it goes into short term memory.
If this information is not encoded properly then it will not go into short term memory to be retrieved when needed and therefore will not get passed into long term memory to be used in the future.
What are the characteristics of STM?
- A brief duration that can only last up to 20 seconds
- Its capacity is limited to 7+ chunks of independent information (Miller’s Law)
- It is vulnerable to interference and interruption
How Short term memory problems affect your child’s learning
- They may forget information read the day before
- Difficulty remembering a sentence they have just read or the sentence they have read previous to this sentence
- Comprehension problems resulting from this.
- Difficulty absorbing new words, their meanings, their sounds and how they look.
- Forget instructions related to a set task
- Forget what the teacher has said while searching their short term memory for the answer
- Find it hard to remember what the question is while looking through a complex text for an answer
- Not remember what others have said in a group conversation about a text
- Writing can be very difficult because it is hard to write down ideas while remembering information as well as think about punctuation, spelling, and grammar as the same time.
- Tune in and out of lessons so only get chunks of what the teacher is saying and not be able to form whole main ideas or concepts
- Find higher order thinking skills such as problem solving really difficult as they require holding parts of the problem in short term memory while thinking about solutions, and weighing up ideas.
- Forget spelling patterns and high frequency words.