Special Education

Students with FAS/E often have memory problems. Like many students with learning disabilities, they may learn a concept one day, but the next day it is gone, only to reappear unexpectedly at some time in the future. Parents report that their child studies for hours for a social studies test, only to earn a failing mark the next day. Children with FAS/E may be able to recall the details of a camping trip from long ago, but not be able to remember what they had for lunch. They may be able to remember hockey statistics, but not multiplication tables. If they drop a pencil while working on a math sheet, they may have forgotten what they were doing or get lost in the middle of a problem by the time they get the pencil back. Even late in the school year, they may not remember their teacher’s name.

Memory can fail at the level of the sensory register (information is not attended to or perceived accurately), storage (short-term or long-term memory strategies are not used effectively to remember), or retrieval (the information is recorded, but cannot be retrieved). Remember that it can be upsetting to students with FAS/E to realize they can not remember something that is easy for others.

Some memory problems may be specific to remembering and using sequences of information: reciting the letters in the alphabet or the days of the week, finding a certain page number in the middle of a book, getting the steps of a procedure in the right order, opening a combination lock, or telling the events of a story in a logical way. Often, memory for visual information is stronger than memory for information presented orally.