When Did You Learn It? How Background Knowledge Impacts Attention and Comprehension in Read‐Aloud Activities

Abstract

Reading science has reached consensus that background knowledge is essential for reading comprehension. What remains an open question for the science of reading, however, is how and when this background knowledge ought to be developed. Teachers often include activities meant to activate background knowledge immediately prior to read‐alouds. However, these activities also often provide completely new knowledge, the efficacy of which has not been well studied. The goal of the current study was to examine differences in narrative comprehension when background knowledge is activated before reading (i.e., students are reminded of things they already know) versus provided before reading (i.e., students are informed of new information). To that end, 92 participants were tested on familiar information (i.e., activated knowledge), taught novel but relevant information (i.e., provided knowledge), or taught novel but irrelevant information (i.e., neither activated nor provided knowledge) prior to reading a story. Regression analyses showed that whereas students showed basic comprehension no matter when they learned the information, attention and more advanced comprehension skills were more successful when students already knew about a topic and merely had their knowledge activated. This suggests that common prereading activities may not be successful for students who are unfamiliar with the topic. Reading science must continue to explore how to develop this crucial background knowledge.

The Science of Reading: Supports, Critiques, and Questions

“…We are excited to present the second special issue on the science of reading (SOR). This issue builds on the success and findings of the first, which pushed the field to do the following: Expand our definition of what is considered in the SOR Confirm existing ideas of importance (i.e., phonics teaching) Highlight newer keys to reading and literacy success, that is, via writing (Graham, 2020), language comprehension (Cervetti et al, 2020; Phillips Galloway, Brown, & Uccelli, 2020; Silverman, Johnson, Keane, & Khanna, 2020), content and background knowledge (Cabell & Hwang, 2020; Kaefer, 2020), and instruction (Shanahan, 2020) Emphasize and consider different groups of learners, such as students of Color (Milner, 2020), emergent bilinguals/English learners (Goldenberg, 2020; Noguerón‐Liu, 2020), students with reading disabilities (Elliott, 2020), and struggling readers (Peng & Goodrich, 2020) Reinforce the complexities of reading (Compton‐Lilly, Mitra, Guay, & Spence, 2020) and the challenges readers face, particularly within digital literacy (Alexander, 2020) Advocate for equity and social justice lenses (Compton‐Lilly et al, 2020; Hattan & Lupo, 2020; Hoffman, Hikida, & Sailors, 2020; Milner, 2020; Mosley Wetzel et al, 2020; Noguerón‐Liu, 2020; Phillips Galloway et al, 2020) Emphasize the need for more work on teacher training and support, as well as privilege teacher expertise and judgment (Hindman, Morrison, Connor, & Connor, 2020; Hoffman et al, 2020; Mosley Wetzel et al, 2020; Vaughn, Parsons, & Massey, 2020) Highlight important components, such as infrastructure (Woulfin & Gabriel, 2020) and translational research methods (Seidenberg, Cooper Borkenhagen, & Kearns, 2020; Solari et al, 2020), that are critical to moving the SOR into practice We hope you have engaged with these pieces, and we direct you to the webpage where we put together all the articles and our introduction (i.e., an executive summary) for the first special issue: https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/19362722/2020/55/S1. You can also check out interviews with authors of 17 of those articles at https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/19362722/homepage/rrqauthorinterviews.…”

Scoping the field of literacy research: how might a range of research be valuable to primary teachers?

“…Several articles focus on comprehension, exploring relationships between comprehension and: morphological awareness (Kim et al, 2020;Lam et al, 2019;Levesque et al, 2019); oral reading proficiency (Sabatini et al, 2019); metacognition (Moir et al, 2020); home language environment (Relyea et al, 2020); background knowledge (Kaefer, 2020); task and text (Toyama, 2021). It is noteworthy that the vast majority of studies in this group focus on reading not writing, and that all studies reviewed confined their interest to the reading and writing of print text rather than multiple modes or media.…”

Developing Social Knowledge to Support Reading Comprehension in Elementary Students With ASD

“…When designing prereading activities regarding background knowledge, ensure activities are specific to social themes that will be encountered in the text rather than indirectly related topic areas. Activating irrelevant background knowledge prior to text reading may have a negative impact on comprehension (Kaefer, 2020); it is possible this would be more impactful for students with ASD. For example, leading students in an activity about sea creatures prior to reading The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister (1992) will not help students comprehend the book's larger themes of friendship and generosity.…”

“…For example, leading students in an activity about sea creatures prior to reading The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister (1992) will not help students comprehend the book's larger themes of friendship and generosity. Be cautious about simply instructing children in social themes that will be present in a text and instead focus on activating preexisting knowledge from students' own experiences (Cervetti & Herbert, 2019;Kaefer, 2020). Due to social exclusion, children with ASD may not have the requisite experiences to make connections to their own lives (Kluth, 2010), so it may • Teacher considers the social knowledge needed to understand the plot of the story and activates this knowledge prior to reading.…”