Vanderbilt Peabody College scholar leads $3.3 million NIH study on bi-directional relationship of working memory and mathematics learning

By Jenna Somers

About a quarter to a third of students with mathematics learning disabilities do not show adequate improvement after receiving skills-based math interventions. A new study will test the effects of combining a mathematics intervention and working memory training on the math learning of first-grade children with mathematics disabilities.

This novel approach is based on cognitive-academic mutualism theory, in which cognitive functions, such as working memory and attention, aid the development of academic competencies and vice versa.

Marcia Barnes, Dunn Family Professor of Psychoeducational Assessment and professor of special education, leads the study, "Understanding cognitive-academic bidirectionality in math learning disabilities," supported by a five-year, $3.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Her team will focus on math word problems, which is a critical foundational math skill, and working memory, since it plays a central role in early math development.

Students with math learning disabilities, ages 6-to-7 years, will be randomly assigned to three separate study groups. The first group will complete working memory exercises on a computer, followed by a word-problem solving intervention that has been shown to be effective for many, but not all, young children with math learning disabilities. The second group will do reading exercises on a computer, followed by the same word-problem solving intervention, and the third group will engage in normal classroom math instruction (as will the other two groups), which might also include additional math intervention delivered by the school.

The students will participate in activities three times a week for 15 weeks. The research team will assess their working memory and math skills before, during, and after the 15-week study, and then again six months later.

Barnes says they expect the first group of students to see the greatest gains in working memory and math skills because intervention in both strengthens the other. Training in both skills is analogous to an athlete warming up before playing a sport; a warmup enhances muscle performance during the game, and playing the game strengthens muscles.

Lynn Fuchs: a pioneer in working memory and attention interventions

Barnes became the study's principal investigator after Lynn Fuchs, the original principal investigator, passed away. "Lynn was a pioneer in rethinking how to develop interventions for children with learning disabilities whose skills don't improve after skill-based instructional interventions," Barnes said. "She would say, maybe we need to think about what else, beyond skill instruction, sets the stage for them to be able to gain knowledge and understandings from math interventions."

Fuchs' study, "Building word-problem solving and working memory capacity: A randomized controlled trial comparing three intervention approaches," published in 2022 in the Journal of Educational Psychology, set the stage for this latest study. Barnes, who co-authored the 2022 study, says it was groundbreaking. To her knowledge, it is the first demonstration, from a randomized controlled trial, of an academic intervention leading to gains in cognition-offering strong evidence of the theory of cognitive-academic mutualism.

In that study, the research team found that a working memory intervention followed by a small dosage of math practice resulted in large gains in working memory and small, but significant gains in math. The study also demonstrated that an intensive math word-problem solving intervention resulted in large gains in math and smaller, but significant gains in working memory.

"If working memory training works a little bit for math on its own, and word-problem solving works a lot for math on its own, then if we combine the two, will we get a bigger bang for our buck for that quarter of kids who are really struggling to learn? That's what we hope to find out," Barnes said.

If the research team can crack the code on improving outcomes for those struggling learners, it could change how schools approach interventions with students who show low response to generally effective mathematics interventions.