Long-term maintenance of memory skills taught to children with Down syndrome
Glynis Laws, John MacDonald, Sue Buckley, and Irene Broadley
Children with Down syndrome who had followed a memory training programme were reassessed three years later. The programme, which involved training rehearsal and organisation strategies to improve short term memory, had resulted in significant gains on tests of auditory and visual memory skills. These gains were maintained for at least eight months after the end of the training period. However, after three years, memory capacity was found to have declined, although word spans were still significantly greater than those found before the training programme began. By comparing the performance of the children in the follow-up study with an untrained group matched for age, vocabulary and grammar understanding, it was concluded that this increase could be attributed to developmental progress and not to any residual effects of training. None of the children had continued to practice the memory training routines resulting in the loss of the trained memory skills over time.
Laws, G, MacDonald, J, Buckley, S, and Broadley, I. (1995) Long-term maintenance of memory skills taught to children with Down syndrome. Down Syndrome Research and Practice, 3(3), 103-109.