Preliminary Report: Effect of the Simply Smarter Program on Short Term Memory, Working Memory, and Academic Competency on Elementary Students

by Robert J. Doman, Jr. and W. Bruce Haslam, Ph.D. 

Reprinted by permission of The NACD Foundation, Volume 25 No. 7, 2012 ©NACD

This study was conducted by The National Association for Child Development (NACD) during the 2011/2012 school year within a public elementary school in Northern Utah. With the approval of the principal the program was implemented by one of the teachers, who took the target classroom and had them implement the Simply Smarter Online program. The study was implemented for a short period, beginning in January 2012 and continuing until mid-May 2012. Despite the short period of the study, results showed great improvement in academic test scores, as well as improvement in the individual students' sequential processing levels, reflecting improvement in short-tem and working memory.

The Simply Smarter Online program was done daily within the classroom, generally involving a 10-15 minute session per child. In each session the students completed seven activities. The first game-like activity was an intensity activity designed to increase focus prior to working on the individual processing activities. There were three auditory processing activities: auditory forward digit spans, reverse auditory digit spans, and alphanumeric sequences, an activity in which the subject hears random numbers and letters which then need to be arranged in correct numerical and alphabetical order. There were also three visual processing activities: visual forward digit spans, visual reverse digit spans, and visual flash, an activity in which a series of numerals are presented one at a time. The program is designed to provide the user with an initial baseline score that indicates current processing ability in the various activities. As the user does the program, it responds to the user's scores and raises or lowers the difficulty level of the activities.

The public elementary K-6 grade school in which this study was conducted is considered an "inner-city" school and had the following demographics, as of 2009: More than 80% of the student population is considered a minority. More than 80% of the student population is on a reduced or free lunch program. In addition most students in this school speak English as a second language and come from disadvantaged homes.

I am going to do something that may initially seem odd to you. I am going to separate the concept of educating from the concept of schooling because they are not the same thing. Educating your child  is providing your child with what he or she needs to learn to think, process and filter information, understand ideas, form new ideas and communicate.  What works in terms of strategies to educate your child changes as your child changes. NACD is helping to change children and adults, of course. As these changes happen, how the individual is educated changes as well both in terms of what is used as input and what the individual can and will do to communicate what they have understood. This is an ever-changing process that moves forward. Strategies are temporary. Methodologies are temporary as they are dependent on processing issues and working memory capacity. As a result, we could not possibly decide what the right thing to do with a student is in terms of educating them that would be appropriate for an entire year.  

For those of you with children on program, and for those of you who are adults on program, you are aware that there are changes in function day to day, month to month, and quarter to quarter. You are even becoming aware of changing function throughout the day. For an individual to become educated in the most productive and efficient way, we need to take into account the changes in attention and processing during each day, the changes in processing levels from week to week and month to month, and the changes in working memory capacity from quarter to quarter. 

Why would we teach to an inattentive child? Why would we try to teach information that is over an individual's processing level or input beyond the individual's working memory capacity? That would be a waste of time and frustrating to the child or the adult. If I seek to educate one individual, then I will use everything I know about that child or adult to maximize the use of their current processing level and working memory capacity. I will maximize the relevance of the information to their life and experience, and will progress at a rate that is correct for them at any given point in time, understanding that this rate is variable.