Chapter 1Background Knowledge:

A Neglected Piece of the Comprehension Puzzle

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2009). Background Knowledge: The Missing Piece of the Comprehension Puzzle. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

• Discuss how background knowledge influences understanding

• Examine three conditions necessary to make background knowledge useable

• Consider three outcomes directly affected by background knowledge

Today’s Purposes

Might it Rescue the Next Generation of Readers?• Lack of background knowledge inhibits

student progress to higher reading levels.

• Remedial programs for readers focus on comprehension strategies but not on building background knowledge.

“Improved vascular definition in radiographs of the arterial phase or of the venous phase can be procured by a process of subtraction whereby positive and negative images of the overlying skull are superimposed on one another.”

How Does Background Knowledge Impact Your Comprehension?

So what strategies did you use?

• Did you predict?• Infer?• Summarize?

You were able to:• decode all the words• understand imaging• understand subtraction• read it fluently

What Comprehension Strategies Did You Use?

• “Improved vascular definition in radiographs of the arterial phase or of the venous phase can be procured by a process of subtraction whereby positive and negative images of the overlying skull are superimposed on one another.”

• Best predictor of reading comprehension

• Influences interest and motivation

• Knowing lots of strategies cannot fully compensate for lack of background knowledge

Background Knowledge is Essential

Table Talk• Discuss a time when lack of

background knowledge made it difficult to learn something new. How did your lack of background knowledge impede your learning? How did you build it?

• Strongest middle school readers utilized their background knowledge of how web-based information was organized in order to search efficiently and accurately

• Knowledge of print-based background knowledge was not enough (Coiro & Dobler, 2007)

Background Knowledge’s Impact on Digital Literacy

Just because the backpack is in there doesn’t mean he can find it!

Background Knowledge is Like a Teenager’s Closet…

How People Learn

• Organized: Knowing where to find it

• Conditionalized: Knowing when it is needed

• Transferable: Knowing how to apply it to new situations (Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000)

• Schema is the hierarchical relationship of information to other information

• Without schema, information is a scattered mess

• Schema unifies this information

Organized Through Schema

• Understanding when background knowledge is relevant

• Directly related to motivation and interest• Students can misapply background knowledge, too• Misapplication: A student talks about the life cycle of

the turtle during a lesson about a turtle in a folktale

Conditionalized by Knowing WHEN to Use It

• Learning is solidified when students are able to apply what they have learned to a novel problem

• Information is transferred in pieces, not in whole concepts, making formative assessments critical

• Establish subgoals for learners to facilitate transfer• Transfer often occurs in the company of fellow

learners

Transferable to New Situations

Table Talk

• In what ways do you foster transfer (application of learning to novel situations) in your teaching? What conditions make it more successful? Under what circumstances does it break down?

• Vocabulary serves as a proxy for what a learner knows

• Volume of word knowledge a child possesses at school entry predicts school achievement (Hart & Risley, 1995)

• Correlated to performance on standardized tests (Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986)

Background Knowledge and Vocabulary

Assessing Your Practice

• The National Academy Press’ website on How People Learn (Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000), including free podcasts and online book http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6160

• CAST Center’s resources on the importance of background knowledge http://www.cast.org/publications/ncac/ncac_backknowledge.html

• There’s arguably no better way to build your own background knowledge about virtually anything than Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). Don’t overlook the Discussion, Source, and History pages for each entry. They shine an important spotlight on how knowledge is build, disputed, and refined.

Building Your Own Background Knowledge