" Instruction for struggling readers should include knowledge building...."
Handbook of Reading Research. Volume 4, p.349
"The construction of mental representations does not involve the application
of precise, sophisticated, context-sensitive rules...." Walter Kintsch.
Comprehension, p.5
When it comes to the role background knowledge plays in reading, the verdict has been in for years now: The more background knowledge readers have about the topic discussed in print, the faster they comprehend and remember what they read. In a way, though, many instructors, including me, have found that insight to be a mixed blessing. The good news was that readers with poor comprehension were probably coping with a lack of background knowledge rather than with an innate inability to process prose efficiently.
The bad news was that the students we were seeing in reading labs and classes pretty much lacked any shred of academic background knowledge. There were lots of things they knew about life and the world, but very little of that knowledge was likely to speed up their understanding of a text describing photosynthesis or the Missouri Compromise.
Almost all the instructors I know, including me, were flummoxed by the magnitude of background knowledge we felt we needed to give students if we were to show them that textbook comprehension was not always going to be arduous and exhausting. Sure we could hand out textbook selections that dispensed a nugget or two of academic wisdom but those few nuggets didn't even half fill a pretty empty bucket. We did our best but still felt our efforts were inadequate, maybe even pointless, largely because students came to us knowing a lot about family dynamics, romantic relationships, pop culture, cell phone plans. etc, but painfully little about the world outside their personal lives.
Yet in retrospect, I have come to think that those of us who didn't think we could ever provide students with enough background knowledge to be useful thought about it in the wrong way. We thought, or at least I did, that unless we gave students the entire lowdown on say the causes and consequences of the Civil War, we were wasting their time. Yet the more I read about the role of background knowledge in comprehension the more I think we were over-estimating our task. (It's also true that the more I read the work of cognitive psychologist Walter Kintsch, the more I am convinced that detailed background knowledge is not the sina qua non of comprehension; it's having the larger framework that really counts)
When researchers talk about background knowledge (See, for instance, "Integrating Memory-based and Constructivist Processes in Accounts of Reading Comprehension,
available here, they are talking about a general framework that allows readers to call up appropriate word meaning or supply the appropriate inferences expected by the author. And general frameworks,with emphasis on the word general, are not that difficult to supply, particularly with the aid of the Web.
Through brief, sequenced assignments, we--and instructors in other departments interested in making sure their assignments are understood-- can supply students with what I call knowledge "snippets" about key academic topics. These snippets can be pieces of text, videos, photos, poems, memoirs, etc. But what they must do is (1) provide a big picture or overview of what a person, theory or event accomplished (2) generally explain why a person, idea or event is considered significant (3) define a key concept essential to understanding the topic addressed and (4) include a relevant visual aid. Students can then use those snippets to create broad knowledge frameworks that allow them to plug in, or as the researchers say, "instantiate" related facts and ideas when they encounter them in their reading.
As the reading researcher Nancy Marshall pointed out years ago, schemas or, the term I prefer, knowledge frameworks "allow an exchange of meaning to occur." They allow the reader to "include new information, to rearrange old information, or to identify old information with new sources." (Available only in print in Comprehension and the Competent Reader, p. 41.)Without these knowledge frameworks,students are in mental free fall, trying desperately to create the larger network or pattern they need in order to categorize new information coming in from their textbooks.
But keeping students from stumbling around in a text without finding any purchase is not so hard as we once may have thought, particularly with the advent of the Web. When students have assignments that confuse them, they can use heading key words, for instance, to get a general sense of what their text is about, and that general sense is probably all they need to develop a schema that will, in turn, improve their comprehension.
