The Critical Role of Working Memory in Academic Achievement

Crowdfunding has emerged as a market-based solution to give frontline complex public service employees the opportunity to acquire resources by advertising project proposals for donor patrons on crowdfunding platforms. However, whether crowdfunded resources can improve offline service outcomes, and if so, how and when, remains murky. Focusing on the context of public education crowdfunding and applying theories from crowdfunding and services marketing literature, the authors conceptualize that the combination of two factors—namely, teachers' request for resources meant to satisfy unmet heterogeneous (i.e., diverse and evolving) intellectual needs of students and donors' screening and approval (i.e., crowd screening) of promising projects—helps improve student academic achievement. Collating novel panel data from DonorsChoose and California Department of Education, the authors show that (1) crowdfunded resources positively affect student academic achievement, (2) student academic achievement improves with the increase in the heterogeneity of intellectual needs that crowdfunded resources likely satisfy, (3) crowd screening of project proposals plays a critical role in the offline effectiveness of crowdfunded resources, and (4) crowd screening effectiveness depends on the type of project.

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Parsing-error-Hindi

10.31219/osf.io/ydetz ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Samar Husain

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Native Speakers ◽

Critical Role ◽

The Face ◽

Case Markers ◽

Effective Use ◽

Verbal Relations ◽

Memory Constraints

The role of prediction during sentence comprehension is widely acknowledged to be very critical in SOV languages. Robust clause-fi?nal verbal prediction and its maintenance have been invoked to explain eff?ects such as anti-locality and lack of structural forgetting. At the same time, there is evidence that these languages avoid increased preverbal phrase complexity due to working-memory constraints. Given the critical role of prediction in processing of SOV languages, in this work, we study verbal predictions in Hindi (an SOV language) to investigate its robustness and fallibility using a series of completion studies. Analyses of verbal completions based on grammaticality (grammatical vs ungrammatical) as well as their syntactic property (in terms of verb class) show, as expected, frequent grammatical completions based on effective use of preverbal nouns and case-markers. However, there were also high instances of ungrammatical completions. In particular, consistent errors were made in conditions with 3 animate nouns with unique/similar case-markers. These errors increased in the face of adjuncts of di?ffering complexity following the preverbal nouns. The grammatical and ungrammatical completions show that native speakers of Hindi posit structures with at most 2 verbal heads and 5 core verbal relations, thus highlighting an upper bound to verbal prediction and its maintenance in such con?figurations. A rating study con?firmed that certain errors found in completion tasks can lead to grammatical illusions. Further, a detailed analysis of the completion errors in such cases revealed that the parser ignores the complete preverbal nominal features of the input and instead selectively reconstructs the input based on their frequency in the language to form illicit parses at the expense of globally consistent parses. Together, the results show that while preverbal cues are eff?ectively employed by the parser to make clause ?final structural predictions, the parsing system breaks down when the number of predicted verbs/relations exceeds beyond a certain threshold. In effect, the results suggests that processing in SOV languages is susceptible to center-embeddings similar to that in SVO languages. This highlights the over-arching influence of working-memory constraints during sentence comprehension and thereby on the parser to posit less complex structures.

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Longitudinal relations among inattention, working memory, and academic achievement: testing mediation and the moderating role of gender

PeerJ ◽

10.7717/peerj.939 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

pp. e939 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Sarah A. Gray ◽

Maria Rogers ◽

Rhonda Martinussen ◽

Rosemary Tannock

Keyword(s):

Academic Achievement ◽

Working Memory ◽

Achievement Testing ◽

Moderating Role

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Measurement and Modulation of Working Memory-Related Oscillatory Abnormalities

Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society ◽

10.1017/s1355617719000845 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 25 (10) ◽

pp. 1076-1081

Author(s):

Brian C. Kavanaugh ◽

Alexa Fryc ◽

Linda L. Carpenter

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Test Performance ◽

Clinical Symptoms ◽

Critical Role ◽

Theta Oscillations ◽

Clinical Neuropsychology ◽

Targeted Interventions ◽

Neural Underpinnings ◽

Neuropsychiatric Conditions

AbstractDespite the critical role of working memory (WM) in neuropsychiatric conditions, there remains a dearth of available WM-targeted interventions. Gamma and theta oscillations as measured with electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) reflect the neural underpinnings of WM. The WM processes that fluctuate in conjunction with WM demands are closely correlated with WM test performance, and their EEG signatures are abnormal in several clinical populations. Novel interventions such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) have been shown to modulate these oscillations and subsequently improve WM performance and clinical symptoms. Systematically identifying pathological WM-related gamma/theta oscillatory patterns with EEG/MEG and developing ways to target them with interventions such as TMS is an active area of clinical research. Results hold promise for enhancing the outcomes of our patients with WM deficits and for moving the field of clinical neuropsychology towards a mechanism-based approach.

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Dependence of Working Memory on Coordinated Activity Across Brain Areas

Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience ◽

10.3389/fnsys.2021.787316 ◽

2022 ◽

Vol 15 ◽

Author(s):

Ehsan Rezayat ◽

Kelsey Clark ◽

Mohammad-Reza A. Dehaqani ◽

Behrad Noudoost

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Brain Area ◽

Critical Role ◽

Brain Disorders ◽

Brain Areas ◽

Neural Substrate ◽

Oscillatory Power ◽

Experimental Findings ◽

Neural Signatures

Neural signatures of working memory (WM) have been reported in numerous brain areas, suggesting a distributed neural substrate for memory maintenance. In the current manuscript we provide an updated review of the literature focusing on intracranial neurophysiological recordings during WM in primates. Such signatures of WM include changes in firing rate or local oscillatory power within an area, along with measures of coordinated activity between areas based on synchronization between oscillations. In comparing the ability of various neural signatures in any brain area to predict behavioral performance, we observe that synchrony between areas is more frequently and robustly correlated with WM performance than any of the within-area neural signatures. We further review the evidence for alteration of inter-areal synchrony in brain disorders, consistent with an important role for such synchrony during behavior. Additionally, results of causal studies indicate that manipulating synchrony across areas is especially effective at influencing WM task performance. Each of these lines of research supports the critical role of inter-areal synchrony in WM. Finally, we propose a framework for interactions between prefrontal and sensory areas during WM, incorporating a range of experimental findings and offering an explanation for the observed link between intra-areal measures and WM performance.

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Peer Review #2 of "Longitudinal relations among inattention, working memory, and academic achievement: testing mediation and the moderating role of gender (v0.2)"

10.7287/peerj.939v0.2/reviews/2 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

H St Clair-Thompson

Keyword(s):

Academic Achievement ◽

Working Memory ◽

Peer Review ◽

Achievement Testing ◽

Moderating Role

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Mediating Role of Fluid Intelligence Between Working Memory and Academic Achievement of University Undergraduates: Does Gender Matter?

Journal of Education and Educational Development ◽

10.22555/joeed.v8i2.527 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Sadia Niazi ◽

Adnan Adil

Keyword(s):

Academic Achievement ◽

Gender Differences ◽

Working Memory ◽

Path Analysis ◽

Indirect Effect ◽

Fluid Intelligence ◽

Mediating Role ◽

Model Invariance ◽

University Undergraduates

The present study examined the mediating role of fluid intelligence between working memory (WM) and academic achievement and tested the invariance of this model across gender in a random sample of university students (N = 560, 228 boys & 332 girls). Heart and Flower task (Diamond, 2013) and Raven’s Standard Progressive MatricesTM Plus (Raven, 1998) were used to operationalize WM and fluid intelligence, respectively. Academic achievement was operationalized through the CGPAs of students. Findings of the path analysis suggested that fluid intelligence mediated between WM and CGPA. Test of the model invariance indicated that fluid intelligence was a stronger predictor of academic achievement for boys as compared to the girls, which suggested that the indirect effect of WM on academic achievement through fluid intelligence was stronger for boys. Significant gender differences were observed as girls’ mean scores on WM and academic achievement were higher than those of the boys.

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