The Effect of Background Knowledge on Young Children's Comprehension of Explicit and Implicit Information

Abstract

Abstract. To investigate the applicability of schema-theoretic notions to young children's comprehension of textually explicit and inferrable information, slightly above-average second grade readers with strong and weak schemata for knowledge about spiders read a passage about spiders and answered wh-questions tapping both explicitly stated information and knowledge that necessarily had to be inferred from the text. Main effects were found for strength of prior knowledge [p < .01), and question type (p < .01). Simple effects tests indicated a significant prior knowledge effect on the inferrable knowledge (p < .025) but not on explicitly stated information. A follow-up study was conducted to verify the fact that the question type effect was not due to the chance allocation of inherently easier questions to one of the two question types. We found a reliable decrease in question difficulty attributable to cueing propositional relations explicitly in the text (p < .01). These data were interpreted as supporting and extending the arguments emerging from various "schema theories".The present study was designed to assess the role that background knowledge plays in determining young children's ability to process relationships that are explicitly and fully specified in a text in comparison to those that are only partially specified by the same text. The study stems from the theoretical tradition of schema theory as explicated by Rumelhart and Ortony (1977), Rumelhart (in press) and Anderson (1977), as well as the research tradition established by Bransford and McCarrell (1973), Bransford and Johnson (1973), R. Anderson, Spiro, and M. Anderson (1977), and Anderson, Reynolds, Schauert, and Goetz (1977.Schema theory suggests that schemata serve at least two important functions during comprehension. First, they provide a framework for classifying concepts 202Journal of Reading Behavior presented in a text. Hence, the stronger the framework, the more likely concepts are to be classified and available for subsequent retrieval from long term memory. R. Anderson, Spiro. and M. Anderson (1977) found evidence for this generalization: Subjects who encountered certain items of food within a restaurant schema recalled those items better than subjects who encountered the same items within a grocery shopping schema. Bransford and Johnson (1973) found that subjects given a passage theme in the form of a title or a picture before reading an obscure passage recalled significantly more textually presented concepts than those not given a theme or given a theme after reading.Another corollary of this function is that concepts presented in text will be remembered as a function of the schema in which they are initially encoded into memory. Anderson et al. (1977) found that recall and comprehension of passages which invited two schematic interpretations (wrestling vs. a prison break or cardplaying vs. music rehearsal) was highly related to the background knowledge of the readers and/or environment in which the testing occurred. Physical educa...

The Effect of Prior Knowledge on the Question Answering of Good and Poor Readers

“…Average readers with high prior knowledge have been found to score significantly better than readers with low prior knowledge on scriptally implicit questions but not explicit questions (Pearson et al, 1979). Thus, background information may have increased the readers' depth of processing and their ability to process the more difficult type of questions.…”

Memory Development Between 2 and 20

“…For instance, the second graders in Pearson, Hansen, and Gordon (1979) could be categorized as snake experts or novices. Questions on a short textabout snakes dealt with information explicitly presented in text, as weil as facts that were only implied in text, but could be deduced based on prior knowledge.…”

“…When people poss t1S baekground knowledge that is eonsistent with the eontent of the text, there is plenty of reason to expect that prior knowledge aetivation should increase learning, for at a minimum the reader is thinking "deeply" about the topie of the upcoming text (ef., Riekards, 1976;Riekards & Divesta, 1974;Watts & Anderson, 1971). Not suprisingly, people do remernher more that they read if they possess and have aetivated relevant knowledge (e.g., Anderson & Pearson, 1984;.Arnold & Brooks, 1976;Bransford & Johnson, 1972;Pearson et al, 1979;Tierney & Cunningham, 1984). But what ifthe person does not possess relevant prior knowledge, andin faet, has misconeeptions about the topic eovered in the text?…”

The Relevance of a Reader's Knowledge within a Perspectival View of Reading

“…This advice is an attempt to translate into practice important research findings on the role of background knowledge (Beck & Carpenter, 1986;Beck, McCaslin, & McKeown, 1981;Daneman, 1991;McKeown, Beck, Sinatra, & Loxterman, 1992;Pearson, Hansen, & Gordon, 1979;Roller, 1990;Spilich, Vesonder, Chiesi, & Voss, 1979). These sorts of prereading interventions tend to be conceptualized in one of three ways (Tierney & Cunningham, 1984): (a) as an attempt to teach vocabulary, that is, crucial word meanings before the words are encountered in text; (b) as an effort to enrich background knowledge, that is, knowledge relevant to understanding the text from the teachers' or curriculum developers' view; and (c) as an encouragement to use analogy, that is, to use sets of information that have similar attributes to the information judged relevant to understanding the upcoming text.…”