An interview protocol was devised to determine whether demands on working memory are reduced by the use of drawn or telegraphic formats. Students were chosen because some aspect of their group testing on presentation formats was provocative (e.g. high spatial score, but low reading comprehension score; high drawn score and low verbal score, etc.). Nineteen non-learning disabled (LD) students from grades 4-5 and 21 non-LD students from grades 6-8 were chosen. In addition, 11 LD students from grades 4-5 and 20 LD students from grades 6-8 participated. Two different protocols, with five separate procedures each, one for grades 4-5 and another for grades 6-8 were devised. Each procedure was structured to reveal a different aspect of the children's problem solving processes. The reported results are for the non-LD grade 4-5 students. Results imply: (1) that the pictures alone give a strong sense of the structure of the problem, and (2) that even after reading and thinking about problems the student generally cannot recall all the important information once the problem has been removed from view (i.e., students tend to focus on the data at the expense of the problem. (PN)