And better yet, it can help us better understand how to overcome various struggles. And though, not a specific reading skill, understanding more about digit span and what it tells us can help us better understand some reading struggles. Simply put, how many digits presented in a row can one remember? This list can be forwards and backwards, and visually or verbally. We must remember information over time to understand the sentence, the paragraph, and the story.Īn excellent way to know how effectively a child is taking in, processing and retrieving information for use within working memory is to administer a digit span test. If working memory is not functioning properly how would you be able to remember information from beginning of the sentence to the end of the sentence and make sense of it all. As we read, we must remember words from earlier in the sentence to make sense of words later in the sentence. Working memory is also important for reading. Perhaps a more contemporary example is remembering a web address so you can type it into your browser window. Ok, I know our phones take care of remembering phone numbers for us nowadays, but such abilities are still important. An excellent, albeit dated, example is repeating a telephone number to yourself from the phonebook to the phone so that you can remember what numbers to dial. Sometimes working memory is also called short-term memory since it refers to being able to remember bits of information for a short amount of time. The digit span test allows us to better understand the effectiveness of working memory. Working memory is a cognitive system that allows one to store and retrieve information temporarily as you work with it. Further studies are required to examine the effects of age and output-modality on these tasks.You are here: ARTICLES for Teachers & Parents - FAQ - Understanding Digit Span Discussion & Conclusions: The current results were consistent with those from Waters and Caplan (2003), reporting composite measure increased stabilities and reliabilities for the working memory measures and all of the working memory tasks loaded onto a single factor. A principal component analysis revealed that the one-factor solution accounted for 66% of the total variance for four different working memory pointing tasks. As short-term memory measures, digit and word forward pointing span measures were highly correlated (r=0.79). Concurrent validity results suggested that the pointing version of the digit span measures shared only 25~40% of the total variance with the standardized measure of the digit span-recall. However, test-retest reliabilities increased up to 0.86 when a composite measure was used with a combination of at least two different tasks. Results The test-retest reliability results revealed that the range of Pearson’s correlation coefficients was 0.43~0.77. Fifty-five normal individuals participated in the study and performed all of the tasks. An alphabet pointing span task and a subtract-2 pointing span measure were developed as working memory tasks. Methods Digit forward and backward pointing span measures were developed by adapting the most commonly used digit forward/backward recall tasks to pointing measures. The specific aim of the study was to examine psychometric properties such as test-retest reliability, concurrent and construct validity, and internal item consistency in newly developed pointing span measures. The current study developed pointing span measures that do not require verbal output and thus can be used to assess short-term and working memory capacities in special populations with verbal-output deficits. However, there are limitations to the employment of short-term and working memory tasks developed for assessing normal cognitive processing for the evaluation of speech and/or language-impaired clinical populations. The Reliability and Validity of Short-term and Working Memory Pointing Tasks Developed for Clinical Populations with Speech and Language DisordersĬopyright ©2011 The Korean Academy of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiologyīackground & Objectives Short-term and working memory capacity theories have gained considerable attention as underlying cognitive mechanisms, deficiencies in which may account for language processing difficulties in individuals with speech and language disorders.
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