Brain training for school kids: A boost for learning? – DW – 07/14/2025

DW

15-07-2025

Apps that train cognitive skills claim to help children learn, and some research backs that up. But there are concerns cognitive training hinders reading development.
The years of educational disruption during the COVID pandemic have had profound effects on children's learning outcomes, worldwide. Children from poorer socioeconomic backgrounds have been particularly affected.
Research suggests that children's cognitive skills are declining — reflected in kids having weaker memories, attention spans, and diminished flexible thinking skills.
So, some experts are suggesting that specialized 'brain training' programs be used in schools to improve those skills.
Cognitive scientists are interested in testing whether these will help train children's working memory, with brain training programs that present kids with puzzles and other challenges.
The working memory is the mind's staging area, where information is processed in the short term. It's the bit that you use when you're struggling through a math or logic problem — the part of our mind that can feel blocked when you can't find a solution.
"The challenge is that some children's working memories are limited, and it's a huge bottleneck for learning," said Thomas Perry, a social scientist and education researcher at the University of Warwick, UK.
Brain training programs claim to boost these brain skills.
One recent study claimed to show that a 12-hour working memory training program had improved children's focus, IQ and long-term academic outcomes.
The study followed 572 German schoolchildren aged 6–7 years over three years. One group of children completed a 12-hour-long working memory training over a period of 5 weeks. The kids who did the training missed out on an equivalent time of mathematics or German classes. Meanwhile, a control group of children had regular classes.
They found that children who completed the training had increases in working memory capacity up to a year after the training.
Three years after the program, researchers found that the trained children had 16% higher chances of entering an academic track at secondary school — 46% instead of the average 30%.
"I was surprised by the breadth of benefits, not just for working memory and closely related academic subjects. Even broader capacities such as IQ and self-control improved," said Torkel Klingberg, a neuroscientist at Karolinska Institute, Sweden, who designed the intervention but was not involved in the study.
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The children in the study trained working memory through a series of different cognitive tasks, including visuospatial tests to see whether they would remember where things were on a screen.
They used a publicly available app called Nuroe, which the study authors claim can help strengthen children's core learning system in the brain.
Perry, who was not involved in the research, said the study correctly measured how working memory training mediated academic performance.
However, he said, "We can't make grand claims based on one study. We need to verify the results with large scale efficacy trials in different schools and with different teachers."
Already, however, he said there were indications that teachers who thought boosting IQ and critical thinking were important were teaching less substantive information related to the curriculum.
"This is damaging for some kids. For example, disadvantaged kids often aren't immersed in reading at home, so they really need dedicated time at school for learning to read. Replacing reading time with working memory training might be harmful in the long term."
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Perry was involved in a large-scale review of over 400 studies testing different cognitive training programs in schools. The review, conducted by the UK's Education Endowment Foundation, found that studies testing cognitive training in research settings (not in classrooms) tend to show impressive effects on kids' learning. But when they are tested in classrooms, they tend to show limited results.
"There's a picture emerging from the research is that some studies show working memory training is potentially effective in certain settings, but other studies show no effect at all," Perry said.
"We don't have this critical body of studies to say that working memory training is a good thing to teach students, or how to do it," Perry said.
Large-scale brain training programs in US schools, for example, showed no or very small effects on kids' educational outcomes.
Meta-analyses have found that working memory training programs do not improve overall cognitive performance or measures of intelligence in the long term.
Some experts have said that working memory training programs do not generalize to "real-world" cognitive skills.
"Critical thinking skills, for example, are based on knowledge that's built up over time. If you have critical thinking, say, about science, it doesn't necessarily translate to other subjects," said Perry.
"So, I doubt we can double kids' working memory and make them suddenly superintelligent."