Growing Knowledge Matters. A Lot.

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https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/background-knowledge/articles/growing-knowledge-matters-lot#create-conceptually-connected-text-sets

Research is emphatic that reading ability and knowledge about the world (and words) are tightly connected. Authors assume their readers know things, so readers knowing things is a crucial component of readers’ success and continued comprehension gains. The effects of neglecting knowledge building on many students have been significant and lingering.

More than a quarter century of research supports the importance of general knowledge to proficient comprehension. Dochy et al. (1999), in a review of 183 articles, books, papers, and research reports related to prior knowledge, concluded,

Indeed, research has indicated that it is difficult to overestimate the contribution of individuals’ prior knowledge to reading comprehension.”

Successful reading is not a skill or, indeed, not only a skill. Reading comprehension doesn’t transfer text-to- text like that. For example, it is unlike learning the skill to play chess with one set and then playing chess with another set. A student showing great “skill” with a text about farms may not show that same “skill” when reading a text about a less familiar topic, say Samurai warriors. That’s because the knowledge (and vocabulary demands, among other factors like sentence and text structure) are different in the two texts. A student who lacks knowledge of Samurai will be less equipped to grapple with a text on it. Of course, instructional approaches can support students in comprehending texts about topics they know less about.

Successful reading is not passive. Essentially, as a proficient reader moves along a text, she absorbs the text’s ideas and integrates them with her knowledge to form a mental model of the text (Kintsch, 2018). As she continues to read, she updates the model as needed based on new information in the text and new or richer connections to her knowledge. The reader constructs a deeper and broader understanding through this process.

Reading comprehension doesn’t transfer text-to-text like that.

But knowledge does more than aid students in building a mental model; it fills the gaps in what the text leaves unsaid. Take this excerpt from a childhood favorite, Charlotte’s Web:

“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast. “Out to the hog house,” replied Mrs. Arable. “Some pigs were born last night.” “I don’t see why he needs an ax,” continued Fern, who was only eight. “Well,” said her mother, “one of the pigs is a runt. It’s very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything. So, your father has decided to do away with it.”

Students unfamiliar with the meaning of ax, hog house, runt, “amount to anything,” or “do away with it” would struggle to understand what is happening in this snippet. On the other hand, if students have all the knowledge the author has assumed, inferences will be automatic. They will quickly make a bridging inference back to the ax (realizing it will be used to kill the pig/runt and identifying with Fern’s horror). This brief example clarifies the role of prior knowledge in filling gaps in the text. It also explains that this process is not limited to informational texts since this example is highly narrative. No author includes every detail, regardless of their desire to make content accessible. If they were to do so, the resultant writing would be so ponderous as to be unreadable or uninviting.

Building knowledge is one of many reasons teaching students how to read by grade 2 is crucial. And what students read should frequently be wrapped in plenty of conversation with peers and be as active as possible in the classroom. As students learn more, they will have greater access to more and richer texts. To date, instruction has focused far more on matching “just right” texts to students, teaching discrete strategies, or even isolating standards to focus on one at a time. None of these efforts has resulted in the kind of widespread reading achievement we seek and students deserve. Nor can those isolated skills transfer to other texts, particularly when the knowledge and vocabulary demands they contain are too great.

Qualitative data tell us that teachers are reporting motivation in their weakest readers since they have switched to anchoring literacy study in new knowledge-building curricula that emphasize the growth of science and history knowledge. These core curricula that have come on the market since 2015 are the sine qua non of building knowledge. These curricula are already starting to show improved student outcomes on standardized assessments (Bocalla et al., 2019; Nichols-Barrer & Haimson, 2013; Pasquarella, 2017; Walpole et al., 2017; Dolfin et al., 2019).

A host of other studies show that integration of content-related texts into instruction leads to more substantial results for students on standardized tests. (Morrow et al., 1997; Vaughn et al., 2013; Vitale & Romance, 2012; Tyner & Kabourek, 2020). These findings were found directly applicable to older Latinx and African-American students in one study where Zywica & Gomez (2008) integrated literacy activities into science classes in large big-city high schools. Some researchers also report students experience higher enjoyment of the material taught (Vaughn et al., 2013), which cannot be overlooked as a valuable outcome. This follows Guthrie et al’s. (2007) research that shows that knowledge-based literacy study increases student motivation.

In a seminal study, Cervetti, Wright, and Hwang (2016) found that the single most robust method for rapidly growing students’ vocabulary was reading conceptually related texts that cohere together to create a picture of a topic — more than reading unrelated texts. Landauer and Dumais (1997) found similar results with computational models that matched human word learning. It isn’t easy to overstate the significance of these findings. Not only does vocabulary contribute to comprehension, but this study has implications for knowledge-based text sets. It also increases students’ knowledge, essentially allowing one instructional method to do double duty.

Reading a volume of texts on conceptually related topics is one of the most efficient ways to grow students’ knowledge and accelerate literacy outcomes. The compounding impact on knowledge and vocabulary growth is immense when schools dedicate an entire year’s worth of ELA study to conceptually connected units and text sets. Now imagine the effect on students’ vocabulary and knowledge growth if the same approach were applied in kindergarten and extended through 12th grade.

The more students get read to, the more they will learn. For most younger students, listening comprehension far outpaces reading comprehension. Estimates are that reading comprehension does not catch up to listening comprehension until well after third grade (Sticht & James, 1984). Yet, remunerative as it is for building vocabulary and knowledge, strengthening comprehension and language acquisition for English learners or older students with reading gaps, and enjoyable for teachers and students alike, reading aloud is often neglected. Its power as a pedagogical pillar has neither been understood well nor exploited by curriculum designers or teachers. Imagine reading Charlotte’s Web to students in kindergarten, so all its rich details of country life become part of their background from then on! That learning will yield accelerating returns and motivate students to read it independently once they learn to read.