Working memory assessments at school entry as longitudinal predictors of National Curriculum attainment levels

By Susan E. Gathercole *, L. Brown, Susan J. Pickering. Educational & Child Psychology, 2003

307 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A longitudinal study of 54 children aged between 4 and 7 years of age investigated whether measures of working memory skills taken shortly after school entry served as useful predictors of children’s attainment levels in National Curriculum assessments at Key Stage 1. Early working memory scores were found to be highly significant predictors of children’s subsequent levels of attainment in literacy, but not in mathematics. Compared with the local education authority baseline assessments also administered at 4 years of age that are designed in large part to predict later attainments, working memory scores accounted for unique variance in children’s spelling and writing scores at 7 years. These findings point to the utility of combining knowledge-based assessments with measures of fluid cognitive ability in order to obtain the best estimates of a child’s chances of future academic success.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c5631e755e86ff710e22db456914cb3883f7027

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Citations in the corpus

Physical activity and academic achievement in children: A historical perspective (2012, background): “89,90 Intelligence measures have been shown to be the single biggest predictor of academic achievement, but only account for 20% e 30% of the variance in academic achievement.”
Early Childhood Memory and Attention as Predictors of Academic Growth Trajectories. (2014, background): “And a few studies have found stronger associations between working memory and reading than math (Gathercole, Alloway, Willis, & Adams, 2006; Gathercole et al., 2003; St. Clair-Thompson & Gathercole, 2006).”
A structural analysis of working memory and related cognitive skills in young children. (2004, result): “The close link between the central executive and the phonological loop is also worthy of note, and is consistent with other recent findings both in children and in adults (Engle et al., 1999b; Gathercole & Pickering, 2000; Gathercole et al., 2003).”
Working memory and phonological awareness as predictors of progress towards early learning goals at school entry (2005, result): “The study builds upon preliminary evidence relating working memory to baseline assessments reported by Gathercole et al. (2003), and provides new evidence concerning the cognitive skills that contribute to children’s developing abilities at the point at which they enter school at 4 and 5 years of…”
Short-Term Memory, Working Memory, and Executive Functioning in Preschoolers: Longitudinal Predictors of Mathematical Achievement at Age 7 Years (2008, methodology): “Although backward span tasks have been used successfully with children as young as 4 or 5 years in previous studies (e.g., Alloway, 2007; Gathercole et al., 2003) many children in the current study were unable to recall two items in reverse order, severely limiting variability on these tasks.”