I tend to stray away from pedagogical themes in this column, but we need to confront an inconvenient truth when it comes to making our young learners smarter and stronger – most of what we work on inside classrooms is a royal waste of time.
For example, take the long-honored practice of finding the “main idea” inside a reading passage. Current research is showing us that spending time building “background knowledge” inside the learner is much more effective as a learning strategy than arriving at a “main idea.”
Youki Terada, a reporter for Edutopia online, wrote an article recently titled “How to Move From the ‘Main Idea’ to ‘Background Knowledge.” Terada writes,
“’In a fit of anger, Moses smashed the tablet against the ground.’”
“A group of young students reading that sentence will come to different conclusions. Depending on how familiar they are with the Bible, some may recognize it as a parable. Others may reel at the thought of an expensive electronic device being destroyed in a fit of pique. For linguistics and literacy researchers Carsten Elbro and Ida Bud-Iversen, coauthors of a landmark 2013 study on background knowledge, the different between the two interpretations has little to do with a student’s reading comprehension skills.”
“Students who properly decode the words and understand the basic structure of a text may still come up short in measures of comprehension because they fail ‘to activate relevant, existing background knowledge,’ Elbro and Buch-Iversen explain in the study. That’s because students constantly make inferences and seek connections to their lives to make sense of what they’re reading – understanding what Moses was actually doing depends on whether you were raised as a Christian than on your ability to grasp the sentence’s literal meaning.”
“In their study, Elbro and Buch-Iversen separated 236 sixth-grade students into two groups. One group of students used concept maps to connect related ideas – an exercise that helped them build a lattice of intertwined knowledge across subjects like biology, technology, sociology, and history. The second group participated in business-as-usual instruction centered around reading strategies such as summarizing and making predictions. After eight 30-minute sessions, the background knowledge students scored twice as high on tests of general reading comprehension, compared with their peers, with sizable improvements across fiction and nonfiction texts.”
“A decade later, new research – this time encompassing more than 10 times the number of students – confirms those findings. A groundbreaking Harvard study published last year investigated the benefits of a 10-week, knowledge-rich approach to building reading comprehension in elementary students. Instead of emphasizing traditional skills like identifying the main idea or citing evidence from the text, the researchers asked the youngsters to read widely on a topic in order to develop ‘generalized schemas that can be accessed and deployed when new, but related topics are encountered.’ Students read about dinosaurs, for example, and thus build a deeper understanding of how scientists collect data to study past events. Those students scored 18 percent higher on later, science-related reading comprehension test, compared with their peers.”
“Here are six prereading activities to help students build background knowledge and fill in conceptual gaps before tackling new texts.”
“Sustained inquiry, vocabulary games, station rotation, hexagonal thinking, tools to map the conceptual terrain, and pretending to learn.”
Sustained inquiry consists of asking a series of questions of the learner. In turn, as the learner develops answers to those questions, their background knowledge expands and deepens.
Vocabulary games build vocabulary strength, and vocabulary strength is key to establishing powerful background knowledge.
Station rotation allows the learner to build background knowledge through varied strategies.
Hexagonal thinking allows the learner to build background knowledge by making connections between ideas.
Tools to map the conceptual terrain are sometimes called “thinking maps.” “Thinking maps” are strategies to help a young learner organize their thoughts.
Finally, pretending to learn is a playful way to help the young learner build their own unique “world knowledge.” Never underestimate the importance of play when it comes to learning.
It’s disappointing that more traditional K-12 systems have not embraced building “background knowledge” versus promoting exercises like “finding the main idea” or “summarizing the passage.”
The world of learning could be so much more engaging and fun if adult learning leaders would embrace research-based practices like “building background knowledge” and “building vocabulary” as strategies to help young learners become smarter and stronger – especially those young learners who happen to be black, brown, and poor.
Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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