Following instructions in the classroom

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Following instructions in the classroom

• Lorna Bourke

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What is INSTRUCTION?

• direction a message describing how something is
  to be done
• education the activities of educating or
  instructing activities that impart knowledge or
  skill
• teaching the profession of a teacher

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Cognitive skills and Instruction

• What cognitive skills would be required to take
  instruction from others?
• Memory
• Capacity
• Serial order
• Recency and Primacy effects
• Semantic memory
• Prospective memory
• Maintenance and retrieval
• Attention (Concentration)
• Focus
• Regulation
• Monitoring
• Inhibition
• Sustained attention
• Language
• Comprehension
• Vocabulary
• Are the above skills what we might broadly term
  ORGANISATIONAL skills?

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Working memory and instruction

• Gathercole, Lamont, Alloway (2005)
• Observational Study
• Frequently observed working memory failures in
  the classroom
• Forgetting instructions
• Forgetting recent events/ information
• Place-keeping errors in complex tasks
• Failing to meet simultaneous processing and
  storage demands, such as counting words in a
  sentence or detecting missing numbers in a
  sequence
• These failures in the classroom can hinder a
  child from making
• normal scholastic progress.

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Dyspraxia

• Learning, thought and memory
• Difficulty in planning and organising thought
• Poor memory, especially short-term memory. May
  forget and lose things
• Unfocused and erratic. Can be messy and cluttered
  
• Poor sequencing causes problems with maths,
  reading and spelling and writing reports at work
• Accuracy problems. Difficulty with copying
  sounds, writing, movements, proofreading
• Difficulty in following instructions, especially
  more than one at a time
• Difficulty with concentration. May be easily
  distracted
• May do only one thing at a time properly, though
  may try to do many things at once
• Slow to finish a task. May daydream and wander
  about aimlessly

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Neuropsychological Evidence
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Reading List

• Gathercole, S.E., Lamont, E., Alloway, T.P.
  (2005). Working memory in the classroom. In S.
  Pickering (Ed.). Working memory and education.
  Elsevier Press.
• http//www.york.ac.uk/res/wml/ArticlesTeachers.htm