Background Knowledge for Reading Instruction
The relationship between what we know and how we read
Dear Reader,
This newsletter would probably be a difficult read for someone outside of education. Not difficult in the same way a paragraph from Hegel or quantum physics is difficult, but difficult in the sense that disciplinary-specific jargon isn’t always defined and the problems addressed are outside the everyday experience of people unfamiliar with schools.
There is an abundance of education research from the last fifty years focused on the role of background knowledge, and the way information stored in long-term memory supports comprehension and expertise. Of course, this may all seem a bit obvious. Isn’t it obvious that someone who spent many years studying biology will have more expertise than someone who did not? Or someone who spent years running a classroom with thirty children will know more about classroom management than someone who does not? When we talk about trades or athletics or professions, the role domain knowledge plays is incontrovertible. Yet, there is also a strain in conversations about education that focus on general knowledge, or the idea that there are contentless skills and frameworks that can be applied to all problems. In the United Kingdom, a philosophy for children curriculum purports to do just that. Sadly, the “universal rules for thinking and learning” don’t hold up under scrutiny.
As I wrote about last week, domain knowledge is critical for reading development, especially through explicit vocabulary instruction. Children do not learn to read through osmosis, nor do they learn the names of the fifty states or seven continents or most types of particular knowledge through their environments alone. Today, I’m going to share a little bit more about the importance of background knowledge in reading.
Next Monday is Memorial Day, so there will not be a newsletter. Whether you will be outside in the sun or catching up on some much needed rest, I hope the time is rejuvenating and restorative.
Until next time,
Erin
That Famous Baseball Study
Background knowledge matters for reading development, but it cannot replace strong foundational phonics instruction.
In discussions about background knowledge, someone will, without fail, mention “the baseball study.” I’m going to say a little bit about why I’m not going to foreground that well-known study here.
But first, a quick summary: In 1980s Wisconsin, sixty-four middle school students were organized into four different equal sized groups based on reading ability. They were then given a passage about a baseball game and were later assessed for their comprehension of that passage. The researchers found that kids with strong prior knowledge of baseball demonstrated strong comprehension of the passage even when they had weaker reading skills overall.
While this study is often cited, it isn’t the strongest citation for the power of background knowledge. The educational psychologist Mark Seidenberg wrote a blog post last September explaining some of the issues with this study. In addition to having a small sample size, none of the weak readers in the study were what most middle school or high school teachers think of as weak readers. Every student had a baseline mastery of decoding, so the data set was hardly representative of a country that graduates a substantial number of non-proficient readers.
Background knowledge matters for reading development, but it cannot replace strong foundational phonics instruction. This point circles back to the Simple View of Reading, which thinks of skilled reading as a product rather than a sum of word recognition and language comprehension. Neither of these instructional techniques are panaceas. (I wrote about SVR here as well as the crucial importance of decoding/encoding instruction here.) We also shouldn’t throw out some comprehension strategy instruction, which I will address in a future newsletter.
So where does background knowledge fit into the discussion of reading instruction?
When a reader struggles to make sense of a text’s vocabulary or lacks the prior knowledge assumed by the author, they are unable to engage in the deeper thinking processes of skilled reading, like making inferences.
Even though the baseball study is not the best citation, there are plenty of others that we can dig into. Recently, a literature review of background knowledge studies was published in the journal Educational Psychology. (Unfortunately, the article itself is paywalled, but you can check out the abstract at the link.) Background knowledge has a substantial impact on a student’s ability to comprehend what they are reading. Knowledge of context and vocabulary and even language structures can either support or inhibit understanding. Proficient readers experience this reality every time they venture into reading something with unfamiliar domain-specific references and jargon.
When students are younger and texts are comparatively simplistic, the difference in the background knowledge of students is less evident; however, as children grow, the gap in how much they have read and how much they know begins to influence how easily they can learn more. This is sometimes referred to as the “Matthew Effect,” which I wrote about last week.
It’s not necessarily bad to struggle with a dense and interesting text, but it is bad when that struggle makes comprehension impossible. As Dan Willingham writes in Reading Rockets:
“Sometimes this subconscious inference-making process fails and the ideas in the text cannot be connected. When this happens, processing stops and a greater effort is made to find some connection among the words and ideas in the text. This greater effort requires conscious processing.”
When a reader struggles to make sense of a text’s vocabulary or lacks the prior knowledge assumed by the author, they are unable to engage in the deeper thinking processes of skilled reading, like making inferences. The bigger ideas in a text are lost in the process. It’s the difference between a struggle that is purposeful and eventually rewarding, and a struggle only for struggles sake. It’s no wonder children dealing with the latter become frustrated and withdrawn in school.
More and more English Language Arts curricula are addressing the “background knowledge” problem by creating “content-rich” units of study, such as Expeditionary Learning and Core Knowledge. This is a great step, especially since most children in elementary school spend a substantial portion of their learning time in ELA, more than any other subject. Yet students are never assessed on their knowledge in these subjects. An overwhelming amount of the time, comprehension is assessed through content-less reading level assessments and reading responses to novel, unconnected passages.
Even if assessments could be shifted, Nell K. Duke, professor and researcher at the University of Michigan, contends that elementary students still need an increase in their science and social studies education. As she explains in this YouTube video, a content-rich curriculum that includes units on the weather and pollinators will not replace high-quality materials created by experts in the field. Furthermore, there are grade-level standards for science and social studies, which are often not covered in these ELA units. Science and social studies deserve a sacred place in the school schedule, where students can focus on the content of these subjects as well as practice and reinforce literacy skills, such as writing.
Extra Credit:
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” - Jorge Luis Borges
The education reporter Natalie Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap, writes extensively about the evidence for building content knowledge, especially in elementary schools. Here are some links to her work:
Yes, There is Evidence That Building Knowledge Boosts Reading Scores
Memorable Quote: “There is evidence that teaching certain comprehension strategies can have positive effects in the short term—most studies last only about six weeks. But there’s no reason to believe that doing it year after year boosts comprehension. Considering that only about a third of American students test at the proficient level or above on reading tests—a proportion that hasn’t changed in over twenty years—it seems that the skills-focused approach to comprehension must be leaving out something important. Like, perhaps, building kids’ academic knowledge and vocabulary as early and as much as possible, so that they’re more likely to understand whatever they’re expected to read.”
Want Kids To Be Better Readers? Teach Social Studies.
Memorable Quote: “But the findings suggest those proportions should be reversed. The researchers analyzed reading scores for almost 7,000 students, tracing them from first to fifth grade, and also looked at how much time they reportedly spent on ELA and other subjects. By fifth grade, students who received an additional thirty minutes a day of social studies instruction got significantly higher reading scores than students who didn’t. That finding didn’t hold true for any other subject: not science, not math—and not ELA, or reading.”
Elementary Education Has Gone Terribly Wrong
Memorable Quote: “As far back as 1977, early-elementary teachers spent more than twice as much time on reading as on science and social studies combined. But since 2001, when the federal No Child Left Behind legislation made standardized reading and math scores the yardstick for measuring progress, the time devoted to both subjects has only grown. In turn, the amount of time spent on social studies and science has plummeted—especially in schools where test scores are low.”