Executive Skills and Reading Comprehension: A Guide for Educators by Kelly B. Cartwright

Author:Kelly B. Cartwright [Cartwright, Kelly B.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781462521180
Publisher: Guilford Publications
Published: 2015-07-21T04:00:00+00:00

Research on Working Memory from an Executive Skills Perspective

Early studies using traditional executive skills measures of working memory in children focused on differences between children with and without specific RCD (described in Chapter 1) and yielded varied conclusions about the relation of working memory to reading comprehension, depending on the type of task that was used (Savage, Lavers, & Pillay, 2007). Therefore, in the discussion that follows, I briefly describe the features of each of the working memory tasks used in the research so that you can get an idea of the kinds of memory demands that contribute to reading comprehension as well as the variety of ways these demands can be assessed. Simple working memory tasks, for example, in which 7- to 8-year-old students are asked to recall lists of aurally presented words or visually presented pictures in exact order, do not account for the difference between good and poor comprehenders (Oakhill et al., 1986). However, 7- to 8-year-old poor comprehenders differ significantly from their peers with better comprehension on a complex digit span task (described in the assessment section, above; Yuill et al., 1989). Similarly, Stothard and Hulme (1992) tested 7- to 8-year-old students using complex working memory tasks, such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC; Wechsler, 1991) digit span subtest and a sentence span task in which students had to judge the truth or falsity of sentences while holding in mind the last word of each. Working memory on both types of measures was lower in poor comprehenders—but not significantly lower—in comparison to typically developing peers. However, their sample of children was small (only 14 poor comprehenders were tested), thus the differences between the groups of children may have reached statistical significance had more children been tested. Nation et al. (1999) tested similarly small groups of children and found that poor comprehenders performed significantly more poorly on the same type of sentence span task but not on a nonverbal, spatial span task (in which students had to locate shapes in arrays and then recall the locations of all of the shapes they had seen). Taken together, these findings suggest that 7- to 8-year-old poor comprehenders have difficulty with complex, verbal working memory tasks; that is, tasks that require simultaneous storage and processing of verbal information, which parallels the demands of reading comprehension.

The studies just described target 7- to 8-year-old children because specific reading comprehension difficulties begin to become evident around second grade, once decoding processes are relatively automatic for students (Cartwright, 2010; Chall, 1996), and specific difficulties with comprehension may contribute to late-emerging reading disabilities and the fourth-grade slump that have been observed in many students (Catts, Compton, Tomblin, & Bridges, 2012; Hirsch, 2003; Leach, Scarborough, & Rescorla, 2003). Thus, more research has been conducted on poor comprehenders around second to fourth grades. We know comparatively less about older students and adults who struggle with reading comprehension despite intact decoding abilities.

Nevertheless, when one considers the studies that involve older students, similar patterns emerge. For example,

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