What is Background Knowledge in Reading, Why is it Critical to Improving Student Outcomes and a 5 Step Guide to Building Background Knowledge

In my first year in the classroom, I was teaching English and Legal Studies at a tough school where many students were far below grade level. Legal Studies was fine but teaching English seemed like voodoo magic, and I was struggling. The way we were teaching reading, writing and analysis just didn’t seem logical to me. How could a student identify quotes about survival, a complex theme they didn’t know much about, if we hadn’t studied survival in depth beforehand? Why would comprehension skills and strategies like visualising and finding the main idea improve reading – wasn’t ‘finding the main idea’ an outcome of being able to read, not a way of improving it? I felt confused and not confident in the classroom, and it clearly wasn’t working. My students were suffering because it was not clear to them how they could succeed.

The missing piece I didn’t know about was background knowledge.

Once I started building more background knowledge in my students, everything changed. My students loved it, they could comprehend texts and analyse ideas more easily. Even their writing improved – without focusing so much on writing skills! Personally, I felt much less stressed and burnt out at because I was focused and clear on what to do in my planning and I had less need for traditional forms of “differentiated instruction”, which took up so much time.

Once you begin to implement more background knowledge building into your teaching practice, you’ll be surprised how much easier teaching and learning becomes.

This post covers:

• what is background knowledge in reading
• why is background knowledge critical to improving student outcomes and reducing your workload and burnout
• How to build background knowledge in reading, English and Humanities

What is Background Knowledge in reading and why is it important?

Recently I was chatting to my next-door neighbour about the importance of background knowledge in learning (ok, maybe I’m a little obsessed but seriously, it’s so important!). He runs a martial arts studio and I noticed that every time I explained a concept, he would reference an analogous martial arts idea.

I know the reason he was doing this is because our brain needs to plug new information into a pre-existing category in our brain. It needs to make a connection with something that we already know. Most teachers are familiar with the idea of prior knowledge and know it’s important but often our focus is on activating prior knowledge – not explicitly building new knowledge.

If you want all the in-depth detail to fully understand how background knowledge works in reading (and learning for that matter), I have an epic post on background knowledge in reading which you should read. In this post, I’m just sticking to the highlights.

Basically, reading comprehension is not a transferrable skill you can teach. It’s not like riding a bike where if you learn to ride one type of bike, you can ride any bike. Reading is topic specific. Which means that if you can read a story on baseball and understand it, it doesn’t mean you will understand a story about volcanoes.

This is because reading comprehension relies on topic-specific knowledge and strong readers know a lot. When a student reads, the way they try to make sense of what the text says is by reference to their pre-existing background knowledge on that topic (prior knowledge). So, the more a student knows about a topic, the better their reading is. This is the opposite of what many of us think and do in our teaching practice. Usually, we think that if a student reads a lot of texts at their reading level, on topics that interest them, their reading will improve. The actual fact is students CAN ONLY read texts on topics they know about and as Robert Pondiscio eloquently put it “by limiting [student] reading to the topics and interests they already possess; we impose a form of illiteracy on them.”

In fact, researchers found that “weak” readers’ reading comprehension was the same as “strong” readers’ when they were reading about a topic they knew about, at least when it came to having a literal understanding of the text. “Weak” readers’ inferencing ability was also improved with background knowledge, but not as fully. For that, we need to focus on the other elements of Scarborough’s reading rope like vocabulary instruction and language structure.

Here are some common classroom activities students will find extremely difficult without the relevant background knowledge:

• Comprehending something they read or watched independently
• Sustaining focus or retaining any knowledge (this is because their working memory will be quickly overloaded)
• Participating effectively in a “flipped classroom”
• Thinking critically about the topic
• Answering broad comprehension questions
• Summarising or finding the main idea
• Analysing a theme in a novel, or finding quotes to support that theme
• Writing an evaluative essay
• Undertaking a creative task like “re-write a scene from another characters perspective”
• Conducting research or “looking up” things themselves

“…by limiting [student] reading to the topics and interests they already possess; we impose a form of illiteracy on them.”

Robert Pondiscio

Why don’t we focus more on building background knowledge in reading if it’s so important?

Given we have almost 40 years of research on how students learn through reading, I am not sure why we don’t focus more on building background knowledge and less on comprehension strategies and writing skills. I think there are probably millions of reasons for it but I personally did it for two reasons.

Reason One: I didn’t understand the science of learning and reading

Early in my career, I didn’t know enough about the Science of Reading and Learning to know better. Furthermore, the rhetoric and unit plans in the schools I taught in didn’t allow for a great deal of knowledge building. I remember once in an English Domain meeting we were discussing our low literacy students and how to support them. I suggested that we just teach one theme (instead of 5) in the novel but focus on it deeply. The response was that “this won’t prepare students for Year 12 where they will need to write on any possible theme in a novel”. Back then I didn’t know the science so I couldn’t justify a change in teaching approach and ultimately our students suffered.

Now I know our teaching was based on critical misunderstandings of how the brain learns. I didn’t understand that trying to teach skills devoid of knowledge is impossible and I certainly didn’t know that reading comprehension wasn’t a skill at all. When we teach in a way that makes it hard for students to learn, we negatively impact their mental health. Students understandably don’t want to be at school, and they feel like failures. For some students, this means they act out and make running the class difficult. For me personally, a lot of behaviour issues resolved themselves when I started explicitly teaching background knowledge, vocabulary, sentence structures and started doing more close reading in class.

Reason Two: I thought I was a facilitator, and that teaching knowledge was bad

Knowledge building is often synonymous with Teacher-Led Instruction, which is a dirty word. Explicit instruction in knowledge is just not as “sexy” as building 21st century skills like entrepreneurship, collaboration and critical thinking. I wanted to be the “engaging” and “progressive” teacher who wowed students with critical thinking tasks. I shunned the idea that I was a “boring” 1950’s teacher who was “telling students what to think”. My role was to be a facilitator and “co-create” knowledge with students. A facilitator doesn’t give students knowledge, a facilitator extracts knowledge. And I kept extracting, even when there was nothing there to extract. Now looking back, it seems so silly. Students are entitled to come to school and be given new knowledge by an expert, they don’t deserve to be limited by their own prior knowledge, which is often what a facilitation method of teaching can lead to.

3 Ways Building Background Knowledge Improves Student Outcomes and Reduces Teacher Workload

1. Building background knowledge is a scaffold that enables all students to access the learning

One of the reasons students can’t engage in the learning is they don’t have the background knowledge to make sense of the lesson or topic. This is less obvious in affluent schools where students are already coming to the classroom with a significant amount of background knowledge from home. However, even high achieving students will benefit from building background knowledge, especially if you select a rigorous, intellectually challenging essential idea the knowledge is building towards (see Step 1 of my Planning Steps).

2. Building knowledge reduces your need to differentiate.

This point follows on from the point above. Once you lay the right foundations in your unit by ensuring all students have the background knowledge to access the learning, students don’t need different content, or activities, or even a different process or product. All students can undertake the same learning and assessment, they may just demonstrate their achievement to various levels of Bloom’s or Solos taxonomies.

3. Deciding to build more knowledge shows you what is essential and what is just a distraction that’s wasting your time.

Once you are focused on knowledge building, you become laser focused on what you need to achieve and your time outside the classroom can be used much more efficiently. You’ll now see quickly which resources will help, and which are sending you down a rabbit hole or, which professional learning will be useful to you and which is just a confusion. Before building knowledge, I would spend hours planning various activities and tasks for students because I was effectively trying to scattergun my way to something that worked. I didn’t know what my target was so I cast a wide net and hoped I would catch some learning, sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t.

5 Steps to Building Background Knowledge in English and Humanities

Building background knowledge in a rigorous way that will stick is a complex process and there are many different ways to do it. We have outlined one suggested process below and also encourage you to come to our next online workshop series where we cover the science more deeply and also an implementation plan of how to put this into action. It will seriously improve everything for you and your students 😊

Step 1: Identify the End Knowledge Goal or Essential Idea of the Unit: This is KEY

• How you execute Step 1 depends on the year level and subject you are teaching. It also depends how much time you have for your unit. In junior English you will have much greater flexibility than in Humanities. If you’re teaching senior year levels and you don’t control the final exam, you may have limited flexibility at this step.
• You are probably familiar with backwards planning, or understanding by design. This is a variation of that. Identifying your essential idea narrows your focus and puts the learning in context for students.
• Your essential idea could be one interpretation you are working towards or more of an open-ended exploration.
• There are many ideas, interpretations and pieces of knowledge you could teach students. But that is not possible. By determining the one idea that all ideas are building towards, you become more focused and efficient in your planning, and you ensure students can succeed by giving them time to deepen their understanding of one concept.
• The essential idea works like a sorting tool, you can quickly scan all the possible content and activities for your unit and identify what is essential to build towards that idea and what can be thrown out.

Here are some examples:

Subject and Unit	Possible Essential Ideas
Civics and Citizenship: Government and Democracy	Government policy can be shaped by powerful lobby groups, even if it is not in the best interests of society OR How does a regular election cycle hold government to account, as well as making them risk averse in policy making?
English Novel Study: ‘Chinese Cinderella’	Is the protagonist brave or cowardly? OR Difficult moments can lead to strength

As you can see, depending on which essential idea you choose, the required background knowledge will be different. Furthermore, relevant real-life examples, sections of text and vocabulary for discussion will be different. By choosing one, you put limits on what is in and out of scope in your unit and therefore reduce your workload and overwhelm.

Step 2: Identify relevant background knowledge students need to understand the essential idea, including real-life, rigorous examples

• This step can take a lot of thinking, it is helpful if your planning team is on the same page and you can talk this over together.
• Now that you have your essential idea, it’s time to identify all the relevant background knowledge students will need for that goal. Make sure it is specific to the topic or text you are teaching.
• If you have full control over what can be taught, I would recommend actually cutting out all knowledge that does not relate to the essential idea. However, you may have curriculum or school requirements that mean you have more that you must include.
• Using the above examples, here are a few pieces of background knowledge to illustrate my point:

Subject and Unit	Chosen Essential Idea	Background Knowledge
Civics and Citizenship: Government and Democracy	Government policy can be shaped by powerful lobby groups, even if it is not in the best interests of society	– What is a political party – What is a member of parliament – What is a law and what is government policy – How laws are made and how policy is made Real life example to explore: Gun lobby in USA.
English Novel Study: ‘Chinese Cinderella’	Is the protagonist brave or cowardly?	– The summary of the plot – Who all the characters are – The context and background of the fictional story such as where is China, what are cultural values relevant to the narrative such as filial piety – What is bravery? How is it defined, what does it look like? – Bravery can be acting despite fear of losing something for example, your life, your job or your financial position. Real life example to explore: Protests in Iran

Step 3: Connect to prior knowledge all students will have about the essential idea (or is easy to explain)

• Identifying prior knowledge is important to frame the unit for students. It provides students with a pre-existing category where they can “save” the upcoming information.
• Introducing the prior knowledge is done right at the start of a unit or lesson but importantly, it is just a springing off point to the background knowledge, don’t just stop there.
• In terms of the examples above:

Subject and Unit	Chosen Essential Idea	Prior Knowledge
Civics and Citizenship: Government and Democracy	Government policy can be shaped by powerful lobby groups, even if it is not in the best interests of society	Have students ever done something they didn’t want to do because their parents or teacher told them to?
English Novel Study: ‘Chinese Cinderella’	Is the protagonist brave or cowardly?	Ask students to remember a time they were scared. What were they scared of and how did they react.

Step 4: Create a knowledge organiser for students with all the relevant knowledge

• A knowledge organiser is a tool whereby you put all of the knowledge your students need for the unit on one A3 piece of paper. It is critical that it is made by the teacher, not the students. It is also critical that it is one sheet and not pages of slides, or lots of handouts etc.
• Further, a knowledge organiser is not a unit plan. A unit plan usually describes what teachers are teaching, the knowledge organiser is a collation of the knowledge that students will need to acquire in the unit.
• The benefits of a knowledge organiser are many. Here is just a quick round up: knowledge organisers are a scaffold, a revision tool and mean that your students no longer need to take notes in class and can move towards application much more quickly.

Step 5: Ensure students consolidate knowledge through regular recall, application, reading and writing

• Steps 1 to 4 relate to actions the teacher needs to take before the unit begins whereas Step 5 is about the student actions in the classroom.
• Once you have prepared all the background knowledge, Step 5 is a simpler process. Basically, you want to ensure that students apply the knowledge they learnt in every class.
• At the start of the unit, the application can be very simple. For example, you could test students on the content exactly as it is in the knowledge organiser, even letting students use the knowledge organiser in the test. Remember, students need to memorise the knowledge to then free up working memory for analysing, evaluation and creativity so it’s ok to do a bit of old school “rote” learning.

Lesson Activities for Building Background Knowledge

• Begin each class with a mini-test covering a few items from the lesson before. Mark this as a class together so there is no out of class marking and students can correct their mistakes.
• Run a weekly topic test. A test on knowledge provides students an achievable goal, especially when everything they need to study for is already prepared in their knowledge organiser and they don’t have to search everywhere for the notes.
• Bring in short articles or texts on the knowledge you are building and have students read and answer text dependent questions (close reading).
• Give students short answer questions or ask them to write a few sentences on the knowledge using vocabulary and sentence structures or starters you taught. For example, if you have taught students that the rise of machinery in the Industrial Revolution meant that artisans were no longer needed, you could ask students to complete the sentence “As a result of the rise in machinery…” Or answer the question “What were 3 effects of the Industrial Revolution – use the words obsolete, redundant and efficiency in your response.”

Key Takeaways and Next Steps

• Building background knowledge in reading and learning is critical to reducing your workload and improving student outcomes.
• Although it takes time to master this process, even making small changes to your practice will reap large rewards.
• If you want to learn more, come to our next online workshop series.