Tablet-Based Working Memory Assessment in Children and Adolescents

Consistency of spatial ability performance in children, adolescents, and young adults

Background

Spatial abilities are essential cognitive skills for many aspects of our everyday life that develop substantially throughout childhood and adolescence. While there are numerous measurement tools to evaluate these abilities, many of them have been designed for specific age groups hampering comparability throughout development. Thus, we determined test-retest-reliability and minimal detectable change for a set of tests that evaluate spatial ability performance in their variety in youth and compared them to young adults.

Methods

Children (age: 11.4 ± 0.5 years, n = 26), adolescents (age: 12.5 ± 0.7 years, n = 22), and young adults (age: 26.1 ± 4.0 years, n = 26) performed a set of five spatial ability tests twice, 20 min apart: Paper Folding Test (PFT), Mental Rotation Test (MRT), Water Level Task (WLT), Corsi Block Test (CBT), and Numbered Cones Run (NCR). Relative and absolute test-retest reliability was determined by calculating the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC3,1) and the standard error of measurement (SEM), respectively. Further, the minimal detectable change (MDC95%) was calculated to identify clinically relevant changes between repeated measurements.

Results

Irrespective of test, reliability was "excellent" (i.e., ICC3,1 ≥ 0.75) in all age cohorts and the SEM values were rather small. The MDC95% values needed to identify relevant changes in repeated measurements of spatial ability performance ranged between 0.8 and 13.9% in children, 1.1 and 24.5% in adolescents, and 0.7 and 20.8% in young adults.

Conclusion

The determined values indicate that the investigated set of tests is reliable to detect spatial ability performance in healthy children, adolescents, and young adults.

Daily breath-based mindfulness exercises in a randomized controlled trial improve primary school children's performance in arithmetic

Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been shown to improve children's academic achievements. Because MBIs include different exercises (possibly with differential effects), the teacher-led Breathing Break Intervention (BBI) was developed which focuses exclusively on breathing exercises and body awareness. The short daily breathing practices of BBI were evaluated in terms of their effects on children's performance in mathematics. In a randomized controlled trial, N = 140 third and fourth graders (49% female) either received BBI (IG, n = 81) or participated in an active control group (ACG, n = 59). Students took a standardized arithmetic test and teachers rated their mathematics performance before (T1) and after (T2) the nine weeks of BBI, and in a follow-up five months later (T3). A mixed multilevel model with a quadratic term of time indicated a significant interaction effect between group and time on the arithmetic test after controlling for working memory updating and parental educational attainment. IG children did not show a steeper linear increase but differed significantly from ACG children in their trajectory of arithmetic performance. At T3, IG children outperformed ACG children. A multilevel ordinal logistic regression of teachers' ratings of students' mathematics performance revealed no significant differences between IG and ACG. Results suggest that daily breathing exercises in primary school classrooms contribute to enhancing children's performance in arithmetic.Preregistration: The study was preregistered at aspredicted.org (#44925).

Tapping versus Saying: Effects of Age, Recoding, and Visual Search on Phonological Span

In contrast to traditional word spans with verbal recall, recently developed automated tasks employ a visuospatial response format (RF). This RF involves additional cognitive processes such as recoding and visual search, which develop across childhood. The aim of the present study was to extend previous findings on age-dependent RF effects, examining the role of recoding and visual search as underlying mechanisms. Groups of primary school children, secondary school children, and adults performed analogous word spans with visuospatial and verbal RF. Additionally, two tasks assessing recoding and visual search skills were conducted. Results show that primary school children performed poorer under visuospatial than verbal RF, whereas secondary school children and adults showed no performance differences. The analyses further suggest that search skills contribute to age-differential RF effects. Recoding seems less decisive, but its role could not be conclusively clarified. Developmental mechanisms and the necessity to disentangle the role of recoding from search are discussed.

Individual vs. Group Administration of Tablet-Based Working Memory Tasks – Does Setting Matter?

Abstract. Working memory (WM) is a key determinant of academic success. Therefore, standardized assessment tools are needed. In the past, WM assessment has been time-consuming and costly, especially in children, as WM instruments could only be used in one-to-one settings. The development of automatized, self-reliant WM tasks such as the tablet-based application EI-MAG ( Oesterlen, Gade, & Seitz-Stein, 2016 ) allows for a more economic assessment of WM in groups. However, so far, only few studies have empirically validated the comparability of WM scores obtained in individual and group setting. To close this gap, N = 89 children between 7 and 10 years of age ( M = 8.8 years, SD = 0.6 years) were administered four WM tasks of EI-MAG individually as well as in groups. The analyses show that independent of WM task, there are no mean score differences between individual and group setting. It can be concluded that automatized WM assessment with EI-MAG leads to comparable results in individual and group setting.