ALL Important Background Knowledge

Recently I had the opportunity to spend time reading interesting research on the importance of academic background knowledge for student success. Studies have now proven that students with greater academic background knowledge tend to not only do better in school but also experience greater educational, career and financial opportunities. What a student already knows about specific content when he/she enters the classroom is one of the strongest predictors of how well he/she will amass new information relative to that content, in other words, how much the student will learn. In his book, Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement, Robert J. Marzano points out that students with robust academic background knowledge in a given subject will successfully learn new information more readily. He reiterates that the opposite is also true.

An interesting article in Reading Rockets titled “Building Background Knowledge” by Neuman, Kaefer and Pinkham makes the case for the necessity of background knowledge in reading comprehension. To comprehend written material, children need a basic amount of acquired knowledge to understand the text. This knowledge is called domain specific knowledge or sometimes, topical knowledge. If a child does not possess this basic knowledge it is impossible for the child to accurately construct a meaningful mental model of what is happening in the story. Without this academic knowledge a child will have difficulty determining the definitions of words with multiple meanings, and may be unable to make inferences and thus think beyond the text. Students with this weakness, often become frustrated with reading at around the fourth grade when reading focuses less on decoding and more on understanding more inferential and theme based text.

Frustration continues in Middle School when the focus of reading is to understand literature and content material. Without adequate background knowledge, students can find it difficult to avoid “seductive details” (highly interesting and entertaining information that is only tangentially related to the topic), and will mistake these for main ideas. Since informational text tends to have a greater density of vocabulary and concepts, background knowledge plays a major part in helping the student understand science, history and math texts.

It is critical that students continue to vigorously develop academic background knowledge. There are many ways to do this and parents can be key facilitators in nurturing the growth of their student’s background knowledge. Suggestions include:

• Provide children with as rich a cultural experience as possible by visiting museums, parks, nature preserves, festivals and fairs. Follow up with discussions of the experience, while linking it to other experiences the child has remembered.

• Encourage topic-focused reading. Students love becoming experts, so encourage your child to read widely on a given topic, developing breadth and depth about the subject.

• Embrace multimedia as a way to experience things that can only be experienced virtually. With my son it was not possible for us to visit the pyramids in Egypt, but a well chosen Youtube video was the next best thing to visiting these antiquities!

• Enroll your children in workshops and classes that interest them. This can be particularly doable during summer when many colleges offer STEM classes for students at the Middle School and High School Level. Nature organizations such as The Audubon Society, and museums often offer opportunities for students to take classes or to go on trips to further their experiences.

• Provide books, eBooks, magazines, journals and all sorts of print material in your home to stimulate your student’s curiosity.

• Don’t forget incidental learning, learning that just happens through an experience also adds to your child’s store of background knowledge.

Dan Willingham, in Why Don’t Students Like School ( 2009), lists four ways that background knowledge is critical to strong reading comprehension:

• It provides vocabulary.

• It helps students bridge any gaps that authors might leave in their writing.

• It allows chunking of information, which leaves more room in working memory to tie ideas together.

• It scaffolds the interpretation of ambiguous sentences.

Not only will enhanced background knowledge help your student become a better reader, it will also help him/her develop stronger critical thinking skills. None of this is possible without background knowledge.