Abstract
ABSTRACT Purpose: to investigate the effectiveness of a working memory-based intervention proposal for reading comprehension. Methods: 43 children divided into two groups according to their performance in a reading comprehension test - G1: children with reading comprehension difficulty; G2: children with no difficulties. All the children were evaluated regarding reading, writing, sentence reading comprehension, and phonological working memory - PWM (repetition of pseudo-words and digits). After this evaluation, children from G1 participated in an intervention program (15 meetings) that stimulated the PWM. Following the intervention, all the children were reevaluated. The results were compared intra- and intergroup, and pertinent statistical tests were applied, by adopting the significance level lower than 0.05%. Results: after the intervention program, the children of G1 showed a significant improvement in all tests. In the intergroup analysis, at the time of evaluation, G1 was different from G2 in reading, writing and reading comprehension. In the reevaluation, G1 equaled G2 in reading and got closer to G2 in writing and reading comprehension. Conclusion: PWM training brought benefits to children with academic difficulties. Thus, these strategies could be used in the classroom, aiming to promote learning.
Highlights
Reading is an ability involving a complex process of perception, memory, inference and strategic processing[1,2]
It has been observed that, in the first evaluation, G1 differed from G2 in reading, writing, and reading comprehension tasks
This study developed and proposed the application of an intervention program with working memory (WM)-based activities, the phonological loop (PL) in children who presented reading comprehension difficulties, analyzing whether improvement in PL ability would aid in reading comprehension
Summary
Reading is an ability involving a complex process of perception, memory, inference and strategic processing[1,2]. According to the idea that reading implies understanding, a child who is able only to decode, i.e., to pronounce the words without reaching the comprehension of the ideas contained in them, cannot be considered as someone who reads. It is necessary, to consider that problems in decoding words impair reading comprehension, since the reader will need to allocate more information in their working memory for the decoding process, hindering the lexical access necessary to extract meaning from the text, which happens simultaneously with decoding[3]
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