Chapter 2. Background Knowledge: The Glue That Makes Learning Stick

Figure 2.1. National Anti-Suffrage Association Headquarters Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division LC-USZ62-25338 DLC

Importance of Background Knowledge

I was visiting an 8th grade social studies class soon after the tsunami hit Japan in 2011. The teacher had abandoned the textbook lesson to focus on the disaster. With copies of USA Today in front of them, students read about the imminent danger of the nuclear reactors having a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Suddenly, I realized that my background knowledge was insufficient for understanding the potential consequences. Yes, I knew that it would be a very bad thing if the nuclear reactors experienced a meltdown, but beyond that, I had no concept of a melting nuclear reactor. Because I cared about what happened (notice the intrinsic motivation), I read several articles about nuclear reactors online; found some simple graphics that described possible scenarios; and asked my father, a retired nuclear power plant engineer, to explain how they operate. As the gaps in my knowledge filled, my comprehension soared.

How important is background knowledge? According to Robert Marzano, "What students already know about the content is one of the strongest indicators of how well they will learn new information relative to the content" (2004, p. 1). John Guthrie is equally adamant as he writes about comprehension as impossible without prior knowledge (2008, p. 11), and the National Research Council states definitively, "All learning involves transfer from previous experiences. Even initial learning involves transfer that is based on previous experiences and prior knowledge" (2000, p. 236).

Background Knowledge

The problem for students and teachers, however, is obvious: the background knowledge playing field is not equal. Let's take a chapter in a science textbook on stars and planets. In a typical science classroom, especially in grades 7 and up where students may have come from a variety of elementary schools, you might have several students whose elementary science teacher worked at a planetarium during college and enthusiastically helped her students build a mock planetarium in the classroom. On the other hand, you may have a group of students whose teacher never really got into astronomy and whose background knowledge is almost nonexistent. Then there are all those other students: kids whose parents have telescopes, kids who live in brightly lit cities and never notice the night sky, and kids who search the Internet for information on constellations because they have an inherent interest in stars.

In addition, there is an affective component to prior knowledge. A good example is the knowledge 5th graders bring to a textbook chapter on the civil rights movement. Those who have visited the Kelly Ingram Civil Rights Memorial Park in Birmingham will likely have a strong visceral response when studying the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963, and they may have an empathetic understanding of what it feels like to be sprayed with fire hoses after viewing the displays and photographs. Students whose relatives were active in the movement may have heard so many stories that they feel like they were there, though they were not born until decades later. These students bring to the social studies or English text not only objective information but also an emotional response that creates a virtual experience as they read. Beginning with the first chapter in a textbook unit and moving lockstep through the book is not only an inefficient way to teach but is unfair both to those who have background knowledge and, more important, to those who do not.

Assessing Background Knowledge

Before beginning any chapter or unit, it is essential to find out what your students know about the topic. What students know is difficult to predict without some sort of objective measure, especially considering the ranges of background knowledge in any one class. Following are several ways to assess individuals' background knowledge and get a feel for how much the class as a whole knows about the topic.

Prediction Guides

Prediction guides, also called anticipation guides (Buehl, 2001), are one of the best ways to assess students' prior knowledge. As an added advantage, such activities give students clues about what's coming next and that helps them set a purpose for learning, an important aspect of motivation.

The idea behind a prediction guide is that the teacher provides students with written statements related to the text before they begin reading. Students indicate that they agree or disagree with these statements, and then the teacher can facilitate the discussion centered on students' reasoning for their predictions. See Figure 2.2 for a sample prediction guide on probability in 8th grade math.

Make sure that students understand that this is an activity, not a test, and that they will not be graded according to the accuracy of their answers. You can turn it into an engaging activity by inserting some crazy predictions. For example, a 4th grade science teacher gave her students a prediction guide about weather before introducing them to the chapter. One of the items asked students to agree or disagree with this statement: "Fog is really just clouds that have fallen from the sky." Some students knew that both fog and clouds are composed of water droplets, but the "falling from the sky" part made them pause and think. When asking them for their reasoning, the teacher found out who understood the concept of fogs and clouds, with a bit of fun mixed in.

Anticipation guides provide the teacher "with some understanding of the quality and quantity of prior knowledge students have about the ideas in the reading assignment" (Anders & Spitler, 2007, p. 171). When you collect the guides and tally the responses, you will see a clear pattern indicating which concepts the entire group has or has not been exposed to as well as which individuals may need additional instruction. You may return the guides to students, allowing them to change their answers as they read if they find information that contradicts what they originally believed, or you may want to have students readdress their guides at the end of the unit. An added benefit is that once students invest in a prediction, they are eager to find out if they are right, and the information often sticks with them longer because of that investment.

In any case, you will have a much better idea about how to approach the chapter or unit after you take a look at your students' responses. Design your instruction to specifically meet students' needs. You may put less knowledgeable students in a group with a student tutor who has more knowledge; you may jigsaw the reading so that students who already know a little about the topic read a different part of the text and share what they learned with other students; or you may offer extended learning opportunities, including online research, to those who have solid background knowledge.

Although creating prediction guides can take time, one easy way to accumulate several for every topic is to have students write their own prediction guides when they finish the unit. The exercise serves as a great review for your students prior to assessment and gives you a variety of prediction guides by the end of the year. You can choose among the best statements for next year's (or next semester's) students. Not surprisingly, you will find that students' statements are often more creative than those we write. Use the following tips to assist students in writing their own guides:

1. Skim the chapter and find the most important ideas related to the topic. Write a few statements about each. Aim for 10 statements per guide.
2. Use short and succinct sentences, avoiding absolute words such as never, always, best, or worst.
3. Play around by including funny or crazy predictions to make the activity enjoyable.
4. Avoid vocabulary that is too difficult or specific.
5. Explore your questions and thoughts and don't worry about following the chapter exactly.

Carousel Walk

A carousel walk (or gallery walk) allows students to work in groups and move around the room as they share background knowledge. Suppose your next unit in your middle or high school social studies or English curriculum is the story of Homer's Ulysses (or Odysseus). Although you may simply ask who has read the story, seen a movie about the adventure, or heard the tale, you won't know if students have misinformation or superficial knowledge without a more in-depth assessment. Begin by listing various aspects of the story that you think are important. If you have taught the story before, you already know what you want students to learn. If you haven't, look through the unit in the textbook and note important concepts designated by headings or illustrations. Now the fun begins.

1. Write one word or term on a separate sheet of chart paper. Examples may include Trojan horse, Penelope, Cyclops, Circe, Sirens, Ulysses, Ithaca, or even concepts such as bravery, adventure, or journey. Tape charts around the room on walls, allowing about five feet between charts.
2. Place students in groups of three or four and give each group leader a different colored marker.
3. Station one group by each chart. When you say "begin," the students in each group will list everything they know about the term. When you say "move," they will advance to the chart on their right and begin listing everything they know about that term until you again say "move." Groups move and add to the lists until they return to their original charts.
4. Have students sit down (within their groups) and go through each chart with the whole class, reading the items aloud and asking for clarification from the groups (easily identifiable by the color of the marker used). You can foster discussions and make connections as you assess, activate, and build background knowledge prior to reading.

Free Discussion

One of my favorite ways of assessing background knowledge is by listening to kids talk. I put students in groups (or allow them to choose groups) and throw out a question related to the reading, such as "Why do you feel lighter in water than out of it?" when studying buoyancy in elementary science or "What do you know about China?" before beginning a unit on China in social studies, any grade. Each group shares what they know (or think they know) while I listen carefully. Students often say things that are far from fact, so this activity gives me opportunities to correct misperceptions or ask them to look up information online and then report back to the class the next day.

Building Background Knowledge

Once you have gained insights about what your students know, you can create lessons that target specific learning, something textbooks simply cannot do. It takes a teacher who knows his students to differentiate, and the more you assess background knowledge and teach to your students' strengths, the better you will become at focusing your instruction.

Many textbooks try to help you by offering a section called Activating Background Knowledge or something similar, but such a cursory approach to activating prior knowledge is not enough. In our earlier example about stars, for instance, one middle-school textbook directs the teacher to build background by asking students if they have ever observed the Milky Way in the night sky. Such questions may guide students toward the topic, but they are hardly sufficient for building or accessing prior knowledge. Even if students' backgrounds were activated through such a question, it doesn't mean that they will automatically connect what they know to what they are learning. You know how easily students can take a question meant to build background and turn it into a narrative that is tangential to what you are trying to teach: "Oh, yeah, I have seen the Milky Way. One time my Uncle Frank took us out to a field in the middle of the night and we had hot chocolate and … ." It is important to explicitly help students connect what they know about a topic to what you want them to learn about it.

As I noted in Chapter 1, an engaging way to connect what students know to what they are learning is to take advantage of the visuals offered in textbooks and do a walk-through with your students, prompting them to speak out if they know something about a graphic or text feature. A 6th grade science textbook includes a shocking photograph of a house that slid down a hill during heavy rains. The written text, unfortunately, is little more than fact after fact about El Niño and La Niña with a reference to landslides and erosion but no explanation of either word. It wouldn't take much time to have students look carefully at the photograph, explain to them how such an event happens, and ask them to look up landslides or mudslides online, perhaps finding other photographs to share. Then when students read in their textbooks "During an El Niño period, warmer surface water in areas of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean leads to more water vapor being in the air above the water. This can result in increased rainfall across the southeastern United States" (McGraw-Hill/Glencoe, 2007, p. 479), they may have enough background knowledge to stick with the text and even comprehend the effects of El Niño.

Textbook Scavenger Hunts

In some schools or districts, teachers are still required to use textbooks for every lesson. Teachers who have few supplemental text choices often feel frustrated by their lack of options in dealing with the textbook. This activity makes the most of what textbooks have to offer and builds background in the process. Create a textbook scavenger hunt for important ideas, visuals, or new vocabulary before asking students to read the chapter. In groups of two or three, have students go on a virtual scavenger hunt (within the textbook) using a list of items that you have created to build background knowledge. Groups will then share what they have discovered with everyone in the class. You may want to assign one or two items to each group and facilitate a jigsawing of information. This active, enjoyable method of building background will add to students' understanding of the text when they begin reading. Here are sample items for your textbook chapter scavenger hunt:

• Choose five words or terms the group thinks will be important to this unit. (Note: Don't use the vocabulary words that are highlighted at the beginning of the chapter.)
• Choose one picture in this chapter and tell why your group thinks this picture is important.
• Choose one graph or map and provide a different caption for it.
• Give a summary of the cycle on page X.
• Write the items needed for the lab on page X. Think of two more items that would be useful for this experiment.
• Find the answer to one "review" math problem in this chapter.
• Record something in this chapter that your group has studied in previous years and discuss what new information is presented.
• List three things to look up online that would help your group better understand this chapter.
• Discuss which visual in this chapter is most interesting to your group. Explain why.
• Discuss which concept in this chapter your group thinks may be most difficult to understand.

Using Picture Books to Build Background

Picture books, sometimes known as children's books, aren't just for little kids anymore. Surprisingly, picture books contain more rare words per thousand words than prime-time television or the conversation of college graduates (Carr, Buchannan, Wentz, Weiss, & Brant, 2001). A quick perusal of what are called crossover picture books, nonfiction and fiction books for adolescent and adult readers with complex themes and provocative subject matter, will convince you that this new category of books is certainly not written for kindergarteners. They are, however, excellent resources for building background because they focus on a single concept, often in depth.

The authors of The Power of Picture Books: Using Content-Area Literature in Middle School note, "Academically, picture book topics offer valuable extensions to subject area content and, in many cases, go far beyond the basic information in the textbook" (Fresch & Harkins, 2009, p. 6). When teaching probability in math, as we discussed earlier, the authors talk about a math teacher who used a picture book, A Very Improbable Story (Einhorn, 2008), to help his students understand real-life application. Picture books build background through visual images as well as through words, an especially important factor for this generation of visual learners. Powerful and poignant images found in picture books trigger memories or make connections in meaningful ways.

As for building background, the illustrations and text come together in a way that textbooks simply cannot by giving students a rich context prior to reading. For example, Maya Angelou's poem paired with graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat's illustrations in the picture book Life Doesn't Frighten Me (1993) creates an experience that deepens meaning for middle or high school English students preparing to read Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1983).

In social studies, the picture book Patrol: An American Soldier in Vietnam by Walter Dean Myers (2005) is another example of this phenomenon. The young soldier in this picture book expresses his fear of dying and tries to understand who the enemy is. "In war, shadows are enemies, too," he thinks (p. 7). In this powerful story-poem, Myers takes us into the war as we share this soldier's unforgettable experience. The illustrations by Ann Grifalconi look like cut-outs glued together to make a collage, and along with the infusion of camouflage, they add another dimension to the reading experience.

Picture books for science and English topics abound as well, from books about Gregor Mendel (Bardoe, 2006) to books that introduce readers to the poetry of William Carlos Williams (Bryant, 2008). There are even picture books for math teachers, the most famous being the Sir Cumference series by Cindy Neuschwander for elementary students. Pythagoras and the Ratios: A Math Adventure (Ellis, 2010) is a good picture book for older students.

Be on the lookout, as well, for longer nonfiction books on a variety of topics: Flesh and Blood so Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy (Marrin, 2011), Journey into the Deep: Discovering New Ocean Creatures (Johnson, 2010), Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Hoose, 2010), or We've Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children's March (Levinson, 2012). You won't be able to read these books to students in one sitting, but you could read a chapter a day or make them available to students who need extra help with background on particular topics. Many of these books have won prestigious awards, so don't hesitate to ask your media specialist to order them to place on the library or reading shelf. You may also want to check out the Orbis Pictus Awards for outstanding nonfiction picture books.

Building Background Virtually

In classrooms equipped with interactive whiteboards—or if all students have laptops or tablets—building background knowledge is easier than ever before. Websites allow students virtual experiences, such as listening to speeches or music from different eras; watching video clips or newscasts; or examining all sorts of primary documents. These background builders significantly deepen students' comprehension of any topic.

The best part of technology is that you can get students to help you. Look through the chapter or unit you are preparing to teach. After assessing students' background knowledge, decide what topics you will scaffold with additional information. In a middle school social studies book, for example, a chapter on India offers a picture of Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi, but only one sentence about him. If you want to teach students about India by focusing on Gandhi, perhaps in conjunction with the English teacher's unit on biographies, have students go to http://www.mkgandhi.org/main.htm, a wide-ranging site about Gandhi that contains primary documents, student projects from other countries, speeches, video clips, and more. You can assign different groups topics to research or ask individual students to look on the site and be prepared to discuss something they learned about Gandhi with their groups.

Current textbooks may also be helpful because they often include lists of websites or DVDs of supplemental material such as film clips, music, or photographs. Digital textbooks have links that will take students all over the world instantly. The hard part is deciding which topics need to be expanded through background information. In the short textbook chapter on India, I found more than 30 different topics, from monsoons to reincarnation. Clearly, you cannot build background knowledge on each of those topics. The obvious advantage is found in exploring one topic in depth, such as Gandhi, and building a comprehensive understanding of India through his life, rather than having students read one unrelated sentence after another about some place in the world called India.

Building Background Through Experiences

Robert Marzano discusses the importance of direct experiences: "The most straightforward way to enhance students' academic background knowledge is to provide academically enriching experiences." He defines the direct approach as one that increases "the variety and depth of out-of-class experiences. Such experiences include field trips to museums, art galleries, and the like, as well as school-sponsored travel and exchange programs" (2004, p. 14).

Hands-on or direct experiences help students understand concepts they encounter while reading and support other activities such as writing or discussions. Many schools and districts assert that money does not exist for such activities, but money may be found through grants, parent-teacher associations, parent contributions, or even candy sales. If it is impossible to take students out of the school setting, then bring the world to students. Often parents, community, and faculty members have vast resources in terms of experiences and artifacts. Let parents and faculty know the topics you will be covering and ask if anyone would be willing to help you create experiences for the students. I will never forget the year that my team-teacher and I were teaching a unit on the Vietnam antiwar movement when we discovered that a student's parent attended Kent State and had witnessed the shootings in 1970. She came to our class and talked about what she had seen, and we were all mesmerized by her account. Hearing her firsthand story brought the experience into our lives in a personal, memorable way.

Similarly, my students often told me that seeing plays by a variety of playwrights at the Shakespeare Festival, going to art museums to experience visual literacy, interviewing residents at a retirement home, and participating in other experiences that I created related to our study were significant factors in their education. I remember one autumn day when we were reading Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck, 2002), and I led my high school students outside so they could walk across the fallen leaves and listen to how they crunched under their feet in just the way Steinbeck described. A minimal attempt at building background knowledge, you may think, but I contend that such experiences do enhance students' understanding and motivate them to make those important connections each time they read a text.

Next Best: Virtual Field Trips

A virtual tour on a website pales in comparison to any field trip, especially an active one such as to a space center. If you've ever talked to a kid who took a field trip to a space center, you know what I mean. Many students have decided to pursue a career in science or engineering because of their experience at one of these centers. They vividly remember talking with astronauts, placing their hands on a space shuttle, or experiencing a simulation of a lift-off. Although the pictures and online tours are better than nothing, they come in a distant second to the real deal.

I recommend a direct experience over a virtual field trip, but we all know that real field trips are often impossible. The next best thing is a virtual field trip; many online sites work hand-in-hand with educators. Middle school teacher Dan Jones told his local newspaper, "I can take them (students) on location to Egypt and they can do a presentation in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza." (Mansfield News Journal, 2011). Jones uses technology made by a company called Yoostar, which allows his students to appear in real time on a computer screen as if they are on location. He also used Skype to connect 8th graders to Ford's Theater when they were studying Abraham Lincoln.

Go to http://www.simplek12.com/virtualfieldtrips and download virtual trips for history, social studies, fine arts, English, math, science, and many other subjects. Many of these tours have been put together by students or teachers and are educationally sound. Another site that offers a wide variety of experiences is http://www.internet4classrooms.com, where you'll find links for Internet sites specifically for K–8 students. At http://www.theteachersguide.com/virtualtours.html you'll find virtual tours of all sorts of museums, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as of historical sites including the Great Wall of China and Gettysburg National Battlefield Park (Pennsylvania). I could list hundreds of websites offering virtual field trips, but you'll do better by simply using a search engine to explore your topic and choosing a website that will fill in the gaps in your students' background knowledge. Better yet, teach students how to be skeptical consumers of online information and allow them to engage in their own personal, albeit virtual, field trips.

Reading as a Background Builder

As I have mentioned, one of the most significant problems with textbooks is that they tend to narrow the curriculum to what will be tested, often resulting in a brief overview of many subjects. The overview can leave students both overwhelmed with lists, facts, and dry recitations of topics and underprepared for attaching new learning to old.

Kelly Gallagher in Readicide (2009) argues that the focus on testing preparation robs students of the opportunity to build background through wide and varied reading. This is painfully and ironically true, but what can you do about it? Gallagher suggests that teachers provide students with an article a week in an effort to build prior knowledge for learning and for doing well on tests. "Those students who sit down to the exam with the broadest base of prior knowledge will have the highest chance of scoring well" (2009, p. 38). He provides a list of the articles of the week that he has used at www.kellygallagher.org/resources/articles.htm.

I recommend that teachers go further in making sure that students have a consistent and wide range of reading experiences by creating a literacy-rich environment in each content-area class. Calkins, Ehrenworth, and Lehman (2012) put this issue in perspective.

One textbook often costs thirty thousand dollars for classroom sets. And often these texts can't begin to match the complexity of good primary and secondary sources. If you are aligning instruction to the Common Core, you will need students to read well-crafted texts that are written with particular (and different) perspectives. This suggests that your school will need to channel whatever resources you do have away from textbooks and toward trade books. (p. 93)

Following are some suggestions about how to make that happen.

Create student text detectives. Ask students to find news articles or information related to current events or the topic you are teaching every week or so. Allow students to sign up for a particular day in advance and have them bring in an article to share with the class. Students could also choose a visual, a cartoon, or an online news clip instead of a printed newspaper article. You may require that students show you the piece a few days before it is presented to check for validity. Text detectives is a quick activity but loaded with new learning. It should take no more than 10 minutes of class time for students to present their news. An added benefit is that students will expand their reading and their background knowledge by looking for articles to present on their assigned day.

Create a large classroom library. Collect a broad selection of young adult novels and nonfiction titles related to your discipline. Although this is a common practice for English and social studies teachers, math and science teachers can include biographies of mathematicians or scientists as well as books on discoveries. A trend in young adult literature is forensic novels. Go to http://www.teenreads.com or have students look through the site to find books that will build background knowledge and get them reading like crazy. Assign a class librarian to keep track of checked out books and make sure students have both time and motivation for choosing and reading books. If you don't have a class library, ask your media specialist to pull a group of books related to the topic of study that you can return at the end of the unit. See Chapter 7 for more information about text sets and lists to help you build a classroom library.

Provide primary documents for every topic you introduce. The Library of Congress at http://myloc.gov offers diaries, photographs, songs, journals, and news articles from hundreds of time periods related to thousands of topics. Again, ask students to take on the responsibility of finding relevant documents so you don't have to do all the work. Students can also be in charge of creating bulletin boards to display these pieces as they build background knowledge.

Get a classroom set of current events materials. Talk to your reading coach or media specialist about subscribing to a class set of current events magazines, either print or online. Magazines targeted for the reading level of your students, such as Time for Kids for younger students or New York Times Upfront for older students, contain the latest news in all disciplines.

In one school, the reading coach sent a copy of the table of contents of each weekly current events magazine to every teacher. With that simple prompt, teachers could request the entire set of magazines or have students access the online version so they could read articles relevant to the topics they were studying. Being aware of the topics in the magazines gave teachers natural segues into opportunities for building interdisciplinary background experiences. In a middle school, an interdisciplinary team of English, social studies, science, and math teachers used the account of the Chilean miners who were trapped 2,300 feet below Earth's surface to cover their standards in an engaging way that was relevant to students—while building background in all of those disciplines.

Even the covers of these newsmagazines are valuable in building background. If allowed, students can create a timeline of events that happened during the year by hanging the covers on the wall in sequence or by clipping them to a high kite string hung across the room.

Background Knowledge: A Necessity

Background knowledge is not a frill of education, a nicety that simply helps students enjoy reading and learning. Background knowledge is essential to comprehension, to making connections, and to understanding the big ideas. Background knowledge is the foundation of all academic study. Not taking the time to assess, activate, and build prior knowledge is like throwing the ball to an inexperienced basketball player and demanding that he play like a pro in the big game.

All learning takes time, and it is incremental. No matter how quickly the textbook skips from topic to topic, it is our responsibility to help students fill in the blanks so meaning is complete and rewarding.