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MEMORY AND ATTENTION

SHORT TERM MEMORY AND COGNITIVE PROCESSING

Muskaan Akram Bhatti

19538

Social Sciences and Liberal Arts, Institute of Business Administration

Memory and attention

Dr. Sahar Nadeem

October 16, 2022

Author’s Note

The study was conducted by Muskan Akram Bhatti Any questions regarding this research can be

addressed to Muskaan Akram via email (muskaanakram6@gmail.com).

The study was conducted under the supervision of Sahar Nadeem, Department of Psychology,

Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, Pakistan. Email: snadeem@iba.edu.pk

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Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the variations in the amount of information that can be

stored in one's short-term memory among kids who are cognitively gifted, students who attend

public education, and students who get private education. Children who have a higher than

average working memory capacity are more likely to be intellectually gifted. This is because

memory capacity plays such an important part in cognitive processing.

Introduction

The main research question that the research paper will be focusing on is the difference between

the short term memory capacity of students who are intellectually more gifted and those who are

not. Furthermore, the research paper will ponder upon on the capacities of students who are

receiving/received public and private education.

The scope of the study

There has been certain literature revolving around the concept of short term memory and

cognitive processing but there has been a lack of literature on the relation between short term

memory and cognitive processing of intellectually gifted students who avail different education

services namely private and public education. This research paper can consequently be helpful

for the administration of these education services to fill the gap of what is tend to be weaknesses

of these students.

Previous literatures
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In today’s day and age, mostly teachers attend to the classroom with assumed ideas of intellect in

each student and thus stay on the same wavelength of classroom teaching. According to

Mendoza (2006), teachers felt compelled to devote more of their attention on children who had

lower test scores rather than the bright students who were achieving at the upper end of the scale.

In the ordinary classroom setting, differentiating instruction for the exceptional youngster

became increasingly challenging. As a result, the focus of the training was on learners with

abilities ranging from below average to average. Some opponents of teachers suggested that the

teachers gave greater attention to pupils who had lower test scores or who had room for

improvement in their own scores. VanTassel-Baska (2005) explored the challenges associated

with differentiating instruction for gifted students within the context of a traditional academic

environment. Some issues include a requirement for developed and expedited opportunities to

learn, the existence of negative attitudes and intellectual barriers regarding giftedness on the part

of instructors in standard education, and a lack of understanding of the type of distinction that is

required for gifted learners.

However, the previous literature focused on the state of Mississippi (Ellison, 2017), therefore,

the findings from the particular research cannot be generalized as the sample size doesn’t

represent the whole population. The gap that this research paper will tend to fill is that it will

focus largely on students of Karachi studying in notable institutes as well as public institutes to

develop a better insight to the research question.

Purpose of the study

The purpose of this study is to determine the differences between short term memory of students

who are intellectually gifted studying or who has studied in private and public institutes with
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regards to cognitive processing. As per previous literatures, it has been developed that there is a

strong correlation due to the type of the tasks (Becker et al., 2016). Therefore, the study will

focus on the behavior of institutes and its effect on the cognitive processing of these students

Methodology

Design

The data collection for this study will be qualitative while the data analysis will be quantitative

as to develop a firm connection between the research questions. Gaps in literature were identified

hence this study will tend to fill these gaps for future research. Furthermore, the design that will

be used for this study will be experimental study as experiments will be conducted on the

sample. For this type of study, questionnaires and focus groups will be used. Instead of focus

groups, interviews can also be considered depending on the responses the questionnaire gets.

Sample and procedures

The study population used for this study is the students of Karachi who tend to have a high IQ

score as to develop the certainty that the student selected for the sample is intellectually gifted.

Furthermore, the sample size will comprise mainly of students from notable institutes namely

IBA, and public institutes namely KU. As IBA tends to focus on providing excellent faculty

services and top-notch educational services as compared to KU.

Measurement

A consent form will be circulated online on social media platforms clearly entailing the aim of

this research study and then the participants will be carefully selected according to their IQ

scores as to avoid any discrepancy in the result. The data will be collected through

questionnaires, these questions will be more open ended and subjective. Consequently, few of
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the participants will be chosen for the experiment. The experiment that will be conducted has

been used before in the said literature where several words will be shown in a presentation style

for a short period of time which will then be used to examine the recall of these participants.

Finally, data analysis will be done through running ANOVA regression analysis on the scores

collected through the experiment.

Limitation

The major implication that this study entails is that the sample size consists of students who are

involved with business schools and therefore neglecting the students enrolled/graduated from

different institutes with different disciplines.

Bibliography

Ellison, A. F. (2017). Short-term memory capacity and recall of students with and without ...

The Aquila Digital Community. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from

https://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2505&context=dissertations

Mendoza, C. (2005, November 30). Inside Today's classrooms: "Teacher voices on no child left

behind and the education of Gifted Children". Roeper Review. Retrieved October 16,

2022, from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ929810

Van Tassel Baska, J., Stambaugh, & T. (2005). Challenges and possibilities - JSTOR. Retrieved

October 16, 2022, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/3497000

Becker, N., Schmitz, F., Göritz, A. S., & Spinath, F. M. (2016, August 25). Sometimes more is

better, and sometimes less is better: Task Complexity moderates the response time
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accuracy correlation. MDPI. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/4/3/11

Aubry, A., Gonthier, C., & Bourdin, B. (2021, June 30). Explaining the high working memory

capacity of gifted children: Contributions of processing skills and executive control. Acta

Psychologica. Retrieved October 16, 2022, from

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001691821001086

ent.