Background Knowledge: Too Much or Not Enough?

No one would argue the influence of background knowledge on comprehension. What we know about a topic provides an anchor for new information and prior experiences bring a level of familiarity with vocabulary and concepts to our reading.

There has been a lot written lately in regards to background knowledge as well as much discussion on the instructional approaches that build and activate this knowledge.  Add to that the focus from the core standards on close analytical reading that limits building background as a part of the instructional sequence and we have the opportunity to reexamine our practice and the role of prior knowledge in instruction.  Below are some ideas I have recently read related to these ideas and some connections to our work with teaching and learning.

In a recent blog post, Timothy Shanahan addresses the dilemma of prior knowledge and notes that the research clearly supports the idea that comprehension improves when students have background knowledge around what they are reading.  It is this understanding that resulted in more attention to both building and activating background knowledge as a part of lesson design. But as Shanahan suggests, have we gone overboard with this?  Sometimes I was so thorough at building background knowledge that students could be successful with the lesson and not even have to read the text.  In addition, a recent article from the Reading Teacher (Reading Thematically Related Texts to Develop Knowledge and Comprehension, Gelzheiser, Hallgren-Flynn, Connors, and Scanlon, Sept. 2014) cautions that spending large amounts of time preteaching and previewing text could result in students seeing the teacher as the source of knowledge and information rather than the text.

Our recent work with close reading has really caused me to examine the role of the teacher in building and activating prior knowledge.  I have read some concerns that close reading does not value the role of background knowledge. But Doug Fisher reminds us that this is not the case.  When planning instruction to help students read text closely, the teacher is making an intentional decision that the text rather than the teacher will activate background knowledge.  This has the potential to put the student in a much more active stance when reading, and demonstrates that meaning is created by the reader interacting with the text rather than something that comes from a teacher.  

So where does that leave us?  We can't ignore the influence and impact of background knowledge on comprehension.  But spending massive amounts of time on this takes away opportunities for students to authentically interact with text.  And while close reading is a powerful instructional technique, not every text should be or needs to be read closely.  Where we typically run into problems in education is when we make these ideas opposing rather than compatible. Real-life reading includes reading different types of texts in different ways for different purposes--so should our instruction.