Impact of using Cognitive Strategies on Working Memory Improvement

Working memory is an active system for maintaining and manipulating information temporarily to accomplish complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, perception, and thinking. Therefore, improving the memory performance can lead to better performance of these assignments.

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of using the cognitive strategies including organization and elaboration on working memory improvement in elementary school students.

In this research, a experimental design, a pre-test, post-test with experimental and control group were used. Participants included 24 students (12 experimental group, 12 control group), sixth grade elementary boys school from Shiraz who were selected by multi-stage cluster sampling and assigned into two groups randomly. For working memory evaluation, Letter-Number Sequencing subtest of the fourth-edition of Wechsler complementary scale was used. At first, a pre-test was conducted for the two groups, then the organization and elaboration strategies were taught to the experimental group, and finally the post-test were run on the two groups. Data were analyzed by using descriptive statistical methods and ANCOVA tests.

The findings showed that there is a significant difference between the performance of the students' working memory in the experimental and control groups. Also, the Eta coefficient is 0.77, which indicates that 77% of the variance of memory is explained through training.

The research finding showed that training organization and elaboration strategies has improved the performance of students' working memory.