Present specific measures to improve your background knowledge and cultural knowledge

Building Layers of Knowledge

To understand how curriculum can help students build enduring knowledge, let’s first ground the discussion in working definitions of the types of knowledge that impact students’ learning. Understanding the relationship between existing knowledge and new knowledge—and, when needed, how to bridge the gap between the two—is critical for ensuring that students have the right learning conditions in place to build knowledge. Here are three types of knowledge that impact student learning.   

• Prior knowledge: This is the knowledge that students have previously acquired that they can draw upon to support new learning. Students may acquire this knowledge through their own cultural experiences and practices (i.e., funds of knowledge) or exposure to related content such as a book, TV show, movie, song, or trip to a museum or cultural center. Students also build prior knowledge from previous instruction in school. As students learn more, their prior knowledge grows, but it is important to remember that students’ prior knowledge may be incomplete or include misconceptions.  
• Assumed knowledge: This is the knowledge that an author assumes the reader has already acquired before engaging with their text. No author provides every detail needed to make sense of a text and expects that readers will be able to draw on their own prior knowledge to fill in gaps or to make inferences. Not all students bring the same prior knowledge to a text. If students do not have the assumed knowledge required to understand a text, they are likely to struggle to fully comprehend the text and learn from it.  
• Background knowledge: This is the knowledge that content-rich curricula can provide to students through strategic selection, sequencing, and repetition of key topics and ideas. Building background knowledge ensures no student is left without important assumed knowledge needed to access new content, regardless of the depth or accuracy of the prior knowledge they had on a topic. Educators may need to explicitly teach contextual information to help students better understand new concepts and content. Today’s background knowledge is tomorrow’s prior knowledge. 

How do these types of knowledge work together in the classroom to help students build enduring knowledge? Let’s look at some research and examples.  

Prior knowledge

Helping students activate their prior knowledge primes students for new learning. As Natalie Wexler states in The Knowledge Gap (2019), “The more knowledge a child starts with, the more likely she is to acquire yet more knowledge. She’ll read more and understand and retain information better, because knowledge, like Velcro, sticks best to other related knowledge” (35). When students lack sufficient prior knowledge and no one fills in needed background knowledge for them, they’ll likely struggle to make meaning of a text. As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham puts it, “There is much more to comprehending oral or written language than knowing vocabulary and syntax. Comprehension demands background knowledge because language is full of semantic breaks in which knowledge is assumed and, therefore, comprehension depends on making correct inferences” (American Federation of Teachers 2006). When students have knowledge of a topic before engaging in new learning on that topic, their cognitive load is lightened: They’re not trying to learn entirely new vocabulary and content while also trying to derive meaning from the text.  

One piece of evidence supporting Willingham’s point comes from a 1988 study by Donna R. Recht and Lauren Leslie, in which students were asked to retell a written account of a baseball game. This research showed that when students—even strong readers—don’t have prior knowledge of the topic of a text, their comprehension of that text is greatly diminished. The research also showed that even readers who struggle may demonstrate higher comprehension of the text if they have prior knowledge of the topic. As Natalie Wexler puts it, “A student’s ability to comprehend a text will vary depending on his familiarity with the subject; no degree of ‘skill’ will help if he lacks the knowledge to understand it” (30). 

By helping students access and activate their prior knowledge, teachers can better understand what students already know and can identify students’ misconceptions and gaps in their understanding. While prior knowledge is usually an advantage for students in their learning, it can present challenges if the student holds misconceptions or inaccurate information, which can inhibit students’ reading comprehension. Smith et al. (2021) highlight studies that found when the information in a text contradicted students’ prior knowledge, the students often gave preference to their prior knowledge.  

Additionally, when educators ask students to draw upon their prior knowledge, they are encouraging students to bring their own cultural experiences and practices into the classroom. When educators understand the home experiences of their students, they can look for ways to connect students’ lived experiences with new learning, making the content feel more real and accessible to students. Researchers Moll et al. found in their 1992 study that teachers are “the bridge between the students’ world, theirs and their family’s fund of knowledge, and the classroom experience” (137). When teachers welcome students’ funds of knowledge into the classroom, students’ lived experiences are validated, students learn from each other, and their lived experiences form part of the foundation upon which new knowledge can be built.  

Background knowledge and assumed knowledge 

In The Knowledge Gap, Natalie Wexler explores how background knowledge relates to assumed knowledge. She writes, “Authors leave out information for the same reasons we all do: they don’t want to bore their audiences, they assume readers have a certain amount of knowledge, and they rely on them to use it to fill in what’s missing” (52). It may seem as though this is not an insurmountable problem and that students can learn the missing context, but Wexler explains how much assumed knowledge can affect students’ comprehension and retention of information: “By the time you’ve Googled the meaning of a word, you’ve interrupted the flow of understanding that comprehension depends on; readers begin to find a text difficult to understand when a mere 2 percent of the vocabulary is unfamiliar” (52).  

What does it feel like to lack the necessary background knowledge? In his video “Teaching Reading is Teaching Content” (2009), Daniel Willingham offers this potentially mystifying sentence as an example: “This brain scan is fuzzy, so I think the patient was wearing makeup” (2:35). For this sentence to have meaning, the reader must know about brain scans as well as the ingredients of makeup products. As Willingham points out, the background knowledge and assumed knowledge needed to understand the point of the sentence is that “brain scans use magnets, so metal makes images fuzzy” and that “makeup contains trace amounts of metal” (2:53). Without this knowledge, rendering any meaning from the sentence is nearly impossible.  

Students who arrive at a text with insufficient prior knowledge will struggle with the text. Before students approach a new text, educators should help supply the necessary background information, but they need to do so in a meaningful way that contributes to learning and is not simply providing disconnected facts. Students can build background knowledge in a multitude of ways. They may look at works of art, listen to a recording, read articles, or read excerpts of other texts that provide background information for the learning task ahead.  

Educators must consider students’ prior knowledge and the assumed knowledge required by a text or new learning. Only then can educators determine what background knowledge is essential for students to successfully engage in new learning.  

How can I improve my background knowledge?

What is an example of background knowledge?

How can I activate the students background knowledge?

What is the importance of having background knowledge?