Myomancy ADHD, Dyslexia and Autism

There has been a lot research on memory, especially on how we learn. The majority of these experiments have been laboratory based, remembering an abstract list of words or numbers. Some of these are classics of psychology, such as Miller’s Seven Plus / Minus Two which showed that most people can remember between five to nine chunks of information. However laboratory trials lack ecological validity, that is, they have little bearing on real life situations.
Now a team from the Oxford Brookes and Warwick Universities have ventured into the classroom. First they conducted two laboratory experiments on the lag or Milton effect which is a quirk in our learning behavior where repeated items are remembered better if they are not repeated immediately after each other. Having established the effects of age and the size of gap between repeat items in the lab they applied this knowledge to children in the classroom. Focusing on reading and spelling skills the researchers third experiment tried teaching the children individually either in one, six minute chunk or in three, two minute chunks spread over the day. This was repeated for two weeks. They found that those children taught in three, two minute chunks did significantly better with an over 80% correlation between the teaching strategy and child’s test scores.
This has an impact on general classroom teaching and more so on children with learning difficulties. Memory is a key part in the problems of ADD / ADHD and dyslexia with a lot of evidence suggesting that a poor memory is a source of these conditions. When considering extra help for these children, rather than having a single session with a specialist teacher the learning needs to be incorporated through out the day. This includes the parents taking an active part to find five minutes here and there, during the day, to coach their children.
Full text of the paper: “Distributed and Massed Practice: From Laboratory to Classroom” [PDF]
See also: Memory Training Aids ADHD, RoboMemo Memory Training for ADHD