Introduction

Let’s jog your memory with these questions:

• What did you eat for breakfast today?
• What is your earliest memory of a book you read with your parents or a story that a parent or other adult told you?
• As you read this textbook, are you able to understand what you are reading as you are sounding out the words on the page? Or do you sometimes read words when you are tired — knowing that you are actually reading the words, not just skimming them or glancing at them — only to find that after a page or a paragraph, you do not understand what you just have read?

As you think about these questions, you will see that there are different kinds of memories. Some things are easier to remember, while others are very complex — such as remembering what you have just read when you are tired and reading material that may be quite complex (like this chapter on memory)! Perhaps you are already beginning to identify different types of memory from the examples provided above.

Linking Reflection to Theory: What Is Memory?

For remembering what you ate for breakfast today, you probably guessed that this was using your short-term memory — and you would have been correct! Things that have happened recently are all stored in short-term memory.

Conversely, recalling the first story you were told involves long-term memory. Long-term memory comprises things that have been stored for years, such as stories or phone numbers.

So, you can remember recent events and store information over the years, but what kind of memory is used in the reading experience I described above? Before we answer this question, let’s turn to some theory.

Baddeley and Hitch (1974) remind us of the fact that memory is not simply “remembering” facts or events, but it is active processing that occurs in conjunction with other mental processing (and indeed in interaction with our world and with other people). While their model may have neglected the full spectrum of these interpersonal mechanisms of memory, it did provide us with some important structures that helped to identify a new type of memory entirely: working memory. It is working memory that best describes the reading example from above.

In my approximately 20 years of teaching, I have found that students have some difficulty understanding how to define working memory or identifying it in children’s activities. For this reason, I would like to spend some good time on this discussion.

Why? Not because you are students of psychology who must understand theoretical models for their own sake (if that were the case, you’d be learning about the details of Baddeley and Hitch’s model). Rather, it is because everything we do with children demands some degree of memory use on their part. Knowing this can help us recognize what activities may be appropriate or not and  learn to support children’s carrying out of tasks in ways that are partially informed by how the mind remembers.

Working memory is actually very fascinating and best observed in real activities, so we will now discuss memory types with examples for you to consider.