Abstracts - Earli

the students before starting their clerkships in year 6 and again at the start of year 7 (undergraduatetraining takes 7 years in Belgium) using a 14 station OSCE assessing basic clinical skills. Both achecklist and global ratings were used to score performance. Clerkship experience and both OSCEscores (checklist and global rating) were used in a linear regression, with OSCE-scores from year6 as a moderator. findings No significant relations were found between frequency of performingskills during clerkships and OSCE scores. Students scored significantly higher OSCE scores inyear 5 then in year 7; this means that after having practiced the skills during clerkships, they scorelower on the same test. Take-home messages OSCE’s seem not to reflect clinical experience.Other more integrated assessment methods may prove to be more valid to test final undergraduateskills levels.F 229 August 2007 17:00 - 18:20Room: -1.64Paper SessionEducational attainmentChair:Alexander Renkl, University of Freiburg, GermanyEffective screening tools for children with working memory impairmentsTracy Alloway, University of Durham, United KingdomSue Gathercole, University of York, United KingdomJoe Elliott, University of Durham, United KingdomHannah Kirkwood, University of Durham, United KingdomThe term ‘working memory’ refers to the capacity to store and manipulate information in mind forbrief periods of time. Working memory capacities are strongly related to learning abilities andacademic progress, predicting current and subsequent scholastic attainments of children across theschool years in both literacy and numeracy. Moreover, children with pervasive learning difficultiesare characterised by marked impairments of working memory function that are rare in unselectedsamples of children. One suggestion for why working memory constrains learning is that thissystem acts as a bottleneck for learning in many of the individual learning episodes required toincrement the acquisition of knowledge. Because low working memory children often fail to meetworking memory demands of individual learning episodes, the incremental process of acquiringskill and knowledge over the school years is disrupted. Early identification of poor workingmemory skills in individual children is clearly desirable given the links between memory abilitiesand learning in the classroom. This paper discusses two different tools for effectively identifyingchildren with poor working memory skills. The first is a computerized test battery consisting ofmultiple tasks measuring different memory components. This tool is based on theoretical modelsof working memory. A second tool is a checklist for teachers based specifically on key behavioralcharacteristics in the classroom that children with working memory impairments exhibit. Datafrom children with low and average working memory skills on both these screening tools andcomparisons with other standardized memory assessments (such as the Wechsler IntelligenceScale for Children—IV memory scale) will be presented. Benefits of screening tools for teachersinclude minimal training required, high face validity, and a quick and cost effective means of– 318 –