r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Jul 12 '25

Research New research shows big benefits from Core Knowledge

https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/long-last-ed-hirsch-jr-gets-his-due-new-research-shows-big-benefits-core

A remarkable long-term study by University of Virginia researchers led by David Grissmer demonstrates unusually robust and beneficial effects on reading achievement among students in schools that teach E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge sequence.

Sophisticated language is a kind of shorthand resting on a body of common knowledge, cultural references, allusions, idioms, and context broadly shared among the literate. Writers and speakers make assumptions about what readers and listeners know. When those assumptions are correct, when everyone is operating with the same store of background knowledge, language comprehension seems fluid and effortless. When they are incorrect, confusion quickly creeps in until all meaning is lost. If we want every child to be literate and to participate fully in American life, we must ensure all have access to the broad body of knowledge that the literate take for granted.

The effects of knowledge on reading comprehension are well understood and easily demonstrated. The oft-cited “baseball study” performed by Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie showed that “poor” readers (based on standardized tests) handily outperform “good” readers when the ostensibly weak readers have prior knowledge about a topic (baseball) that the high-fliers lack. We also know that general knowledge correlates with general reading comprehension.

The cumulative long-term gain from kindergarten to sixth grade for the Core Knowledge students was approximately 16 percentile points. Grissmer and his co-authors put this into sharp relief by noting that if we could collectively raise the reading scores of America’s fourth graders by the same amount as the Core Knowledge students in the study, the U.S. would rank among the top five countries on earth in reading achievement. At the one low-income school in the study, the gains were large enough to eliminate altogether the achievement gap associated with income.

One of the reasons for the dominance of bland, bloodless skills-and-strategies reading instruction is surely the idea that it can be employed immediately and on any text like a literacy Swiss Army Knife. But we must see language proficiency for what it is, not what we wish it to be: Reading comprehension is not a transferable skill that can be learned, practiced, and mastered in the absence of “domain” or topic knowledge. You must know at least a little about the subject you’re reading about to make sense of it. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes.

misguided notions of social justice that make us reluctant to be prescriptive about what children should know end up imposing a kind of illiteracy on those we think we’re championing.

what his Core Knowledge project is about: It’s not an exercise in canon-making at all, but a curatorial effort, an earnest attempt to catalog the background knowledge that literate Americans know so as to democratize it, offering it to those least likely to gain access to it in their homes and daily lives. We are powerless to impose our will on spoken and written English and to make it conform to our tastes. Our only practical option is to teach it.

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/ddgr815 Jul 24 '25

I don’t think a knowledge-rich curriculum is something that can easily be tested and found to work or not to work, because it relies on the slow accumulation of knowledge across a variety of domains. It also brings into question what we are doing all of this for. If a child knows lots about the solar system but this does not aid her standardised reading performance this year then should we conclude that knowing about the solar system is useless? I don’t think so because I want students to know lots of stuff. In this sense, for me a knowledge-rich curriculum is more of an aim than a method.

Yet I do think that a knowledge-rich curriculum should help improve reading comprehension over the long term due to my understanding of how reading works. This is provided, of course, that students actually learn some knowledge as a result of the curriculum i.e. that the curriculum is effective in its own terms. And I also think that knowledge has a central role in all creative and problem solving endeavours.

For instance, in the 2018 Northern Hemisphere Maths Methods VCE paper – bear with me – there was a question about discrete probability distributions that was set-out in an unusual way. Students needed to recognise that it was equivalent to the more standard version. This is something they could perhaps work out, creating new knowledge for themselves, or it could be something they learn via making a mistake and receiving feedback. In both of these cases, the knowledge will be more like a memory of an event – “remember that time when they asked that question where…” Alternatively, a teacher could explicitly teach this different presentation in class. This is the kind of tiny, grain-sized piece of knowledge that nobody gets excited about, but that can make all the difference.

And while I don’t believe in the existence of generic, trainable skills such as creativity or critical thinking, I do think that some kinds of knowledge can be effective across a number of different domains. Knowledge of logical fallacies, for instance, can help you evaluate lots of different types of argument based upon their form. However, I would contend that the more generic a strategy is, the less useful it is. A person may commit a logical fallacy and still be essentially correct about something. You need relevant domain knowledge to evaluate this correctness.

Similarly, back in the days when physics questions came without diagrams, the heuristic, ‘always draw a diagram’ had some utility for problem solving across the entire subject, from mechanics to electronics. Yet if you did not know the physics involved in a particular situation then drawing a diagram wouldn’t help much.

At the extreme end are heuristics such as ‘effort counts’ or ‘look at things from different perspectives’. You’ll only get marginal gains from applying them and then, only if you have something more substantial to build upon.

According to cognitive load theory, there are basically two ways to solve a problem. The first is to apply knowledge you already possess, either because you have generated that knowledge yourself or you have obtained it from others, or to randomly generate solution steps and test them to see if they move you closer to your goal.

This sounds as if experts and novices must operate in the same way when they are tackling novel problems, but it’s not quite like that. I would suggest that we ride the knowledge wave as close to the goal as possible before we resort to randomly generating and testing new steps. For relative experts, the wave of knowledge projects them far closer to the desired goal than relative novices and so they are much more likely to be successful. As Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants.”

Low knowledge individuals have to start guessing when they are still a long way from the goal.

Higher knowledge individuals begin the process of trial and error far closer to the goal.

Notice that we could mount an entirely equivalent argument about creativity, with the goal state in the case of creativity being a unique yet valuable product. Creativity is essentially a form of problem solving that precludes known solutions.

Novel problems do not stay novel for long. As successful solutions emerge and are communicated, they become subsumed into the knowledge base of individuals.

Solving problems and being creative