That phone number example happens to me all the those birds I saw earlier today were really must be close to dinner time.

Once again thanks!

what were we talking about?

working memory. So, perhaps our Attention Deficit children really have large working memories that are NOT being challenged.

Unrelated. Interesting, but unrelated.

But if true, then one way of keeping focused is to make sure there are sufficient bits of info to engage working memory. Tough task, as students chunk material and reduce the items they'd need to hold. So you'd expect that if you present 5 bits of info you'd need to either allow faster-chunking students to have free memory for other things or risk providing additional material for them at the risk of overloading the slower students.

Not a novel insight. Knowing the mechanism is nice, though.

A central issue is missed by the interpreters (not the researchers, of course). There are students who are distracted but not disconnected. Your mind can drift, you're off task, and when prompted you come back. You might recover using auditory memory, you might have been drifting out. But the relevant info is still in working memory.

But there are students who are just off task. When they are brought back (i.e., asked if they're focused) they stare blankly. Their working memory is entirely engaged elsewhere. It may not be larger. There's no way of knowing. All you know is that their focus is elsewhere: This may be because they have an obscenely large working memory and the 4 items you presented allowed a 5th and 6th to drift in, dislodging the 4 items the student should be working on. It might be that they have an absurdly small working memory and the big date that they heard Sue's friend Pete's going to have has occupied all of it.

The short article was written so blandly, my mind wandered several times. But is that good or bad?