Building Meaningful, Relevant, and Useful Background Knowledge in Literacy
By Dr. Matt Strader, Director of Academic Design, Literacy 6–12, McGraw Hill School Group
As part of the Science of Reading, recent conversations have focused on how background knowledge supports students’ literacy. We have known about the importance of background knowledge for a while. In 1988, Leslie and Recht found that low-performing readers with background knowledge could comprehend more than high-performing readers without background knowledge. The result of their experiment has been repeated throughout the decades since.
However, the impacts of background knowledge go beyond comprehension. Higher comprehension means students can learn more content through text, and in turn, they build more background knowledge to support even more comprehension. This virtuous cycle is known as the Matthew Effect (Stanovich, 1986). Additionally, students rely on background knowledge to make inferences and think critically while reading. The more background knowledge students have, the more capable they are with these skills.
Building Knowledge Networks
As students learn, they create knowledge networks that grow over time. For example, imagine an American student who first learns about the concept of government and then adds to that knowledge network the concepts of law, president, and so on. Later, that student might learn about forms of government beyond democracy and develop an understanding of how these governments have fared throughout history; perhaps monarchy and revolution are added to the student’s knowledge network. In high school, the student studies the foundational documents of the United States and the historical context in which they were written, critically thinking about the meaning of unalienable and equal in the context of 1776. In this example, we can see how the student builds a deep knowledge network around the concept of government over several years of study. Knowledge like this is coded in the long-term memory, freeing up working memory for reading and thinking tasks. In this way, robust knowledge networks support students in reading complex texts and completing challenging tasks (Catts, 2021).
Types of Background Knowledge
Cervetti and Wright (2020) describe three types of background knowledge:
- Academic: knowledge gained in school or through study
- Experiential: knowledge gained through personal lived experience
- Cultural: knowledge of how the world works and how we operate in it
It is important to note that standards and curriculum can support educators in making some assumptions about a student’s academic prior knowledge. However, educators should not make assumptions about a student’s experiential or cultural knowledge. Furthermore, it is important that educators reflect on how their own cultural knowledge might compare to that of their students.
Meaningful, Relevant Background Knowledge in Secondary ELA
One challenge in the secondary classroom is deciding on the topics of study that are most important to students. How do we equip students with knowledge that is useful in a rapidly changing world? How do we honor our school community’s values and culture in what we choose to study?
One familiar approach is essential questions that organize courses of study into bodies of knowledge, but these are often broad and thematic in secondary — for example: What does it mean to be an American? You might be wondering how to make such a broad question meaningful to your students. One answer is examining the thematic question through a defined body of topical knowledge aligned with students’ values and needs. What does it mean to be an American? could be answered by studying complex texts that elevate specific social and cultural groups that have contributed to American culture across history, for example. However, we must not limit students by insisting they think from only one topical perspective. Remember, students have experiential and cultural knowledge, too!
So, as we design assignments, perhaps students do answer what it means to be an American by drawing evidence from texts studied in class, but they also could compare these texts to their own experiences.
In short, we can use thematic questions to help students think about big concepts, provide related texts to build relevant topical knowledge within those concepts, and then encourage them to combine their new academic background knowledge with their own experiential and cultural background knowledge to communicate their understanding.
Tips for Your Classroom
Beyond essential questions and topical knowledge, there are a few things we can do in the classroom to support students in applying their background knowledge effectively:
- Don’t assume what background knowledge students arrive with, especially experiential and cultural background knowledge. Build strong relationships and provide students with surveys to understand what they know and what gaps they may have.
- As an educator, reflect on your own cultural background knowledge and that of your students. Be aware of how false assumptions of shared culture could impact your students.
- Remember that activating background knowledge includes activating students’ knowledge networks, not just facts about the reading topic. Design pre-reading activities that support students in thinking about the breadth of their knowledge networks (Catts, 2021).
- Allow students to spend sustained time studying topics in a unit to build background knowledge. Usually, secondary students need at least three weeks of study on a topic to increase their background knowledge.
- Allow students time for brief research about a topic they are interested in to grow their background knowledge networks. Remember that not every research moment has to be a full research project.
- Build reading assessments that allow students to choose topics so that they can pick the topic with which they are most familiar.
Background knowledge is a powerful tool in supporting students’ literacy skills. Just as we instruct on vocabulary, strategies, and language, we should be intentional in building students’ knowledge networks over time.
Dr. Matt Strader is Director of Academic Design, Literacy 6–12 at McGraw Hill. His research and expertise centers on self-efficacy for digital learners, and he is a thought leader in bringing motivational learning theory into digital environments. A former teacher and administrator, Dr. Strader has trained teachers across the United States and abroad and has partnered with districts to leverage EdTech to improve educational outcomes.
References
Catts, H. W. (2021). Rethinking how to promote reading comprehension. American Educator.
Cervetti, G. N., & Wright, T. S. (2020). The role of knowledge in understanding and learning from text. Handbook of Reading Research, 5, 237–260.
Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16–20. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.1.16
Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21(4), 360–407. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.21.4.1
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