How to Use Social Studies to Reach Your Science of Reading Goals

Hint: It’s All About Knowledge Building!

What is Knowledge Building?

Much of the conversation about the science of reading has been around word recognition — in Scarborough’s Reading Rope, that includes phonemic awareness, decoding, and sight recognition. While phonics is critical, the other half of the rope matters, too. In Scarborough’s Rope, knowledge building or background knowledge is a strand of language comprehension. The principle behind knowledge building is simple — if students have some knowledge about the contents of a text, they’ll comprehend more as they read. For more on the research behind and implications of knowledge building, read this article.

Knowledge Building with Social Studies

As conversations about the science of reading move beyond the urgency of phonics, educators are exploring ways to build students’ background knowledge for improved text comprehension. Of course, students can’t know everything about everything, so debates about what knowledge is most important abound. Science and social studies are often considered good places to start because they provide students with fundamental knowledge about the world around them that will support their comprehension of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and more.

In an article in Education Week, education professor Sonia Cabell said, “Over the past few decades, reading comprehension instruction has become ‘content agnostic,’ focused on skill practice, to the detriment of learning about science, history, and other disciplines” (Schwartz, 2023). Dr. Cabell and colleagues conducted a recent meta-analysis examining the effects of programs that integrated literacy and content area instruction (science and social studies lessons). Education Week summarized the results:

“Kids who were taught this way retained more vocabulary and understood content better than children who learned science or social studies separately from reading instruction. These students also did better on standardized tests of reading comprehension. The integrated approach not only made them better readers of the content they were learning, it made them better readers overall” (Schwartz, 2023).

Importantly, these programs weren’t teaching students rote memorization of facts. Instead, they were providing students with opportunities to deeply explore complex concepts. That’s where our K-5 social studies program, Impact Social Studies, comes in. A research-based, student-centered program that explores complex concepts through inquiry, Impact builds background knowledge with embedded literacy instruction, all while promoting students’ understanding of the world and their place in it.

How to Build Background Knowledge in Social Studies

Here are a few central components of Impact Social Studies that support knowledge building in alignment with the science of reading:

Inquiry Framework. Impact follows the C3 Framework, which centers on teaching through inquiry and incorporating interdisciplinary studies. Inquiry-based models encourage critical thinking about complex concepts in history and social studies, building robust background knowledge that will support comprehension of a variety of texts. Impact helps students learn to think historically, civically, spatially, and economically.

Close Reading Activities. Social studies texts and primary sources lend themselves well to opportunities for close reading. Impact’s “Analyze the Source” activities prompt students to follow a guided close reading routine in Inquiry Journals as they annotate text, take notes, and dig deeper into the content. Students also use Foldables©, three-dimensional graphic organizers developed by Dinah Zike, to organize, remember, and make sense of new ideas.

Practice New Vocabulary. Social studies texts are packed with academic language and new content vocabulary. Impact helps students master new words and integrate them into their language toolbox with interactive, online word-play games and repeated exposure to words in context.

Explore Literature and Genres. Deep explorations of complex social studies or history topics should involve knowledge building through a variety of text genres and sources. In Impact, teachers can enrich lessons with a variety of literary selections, including poetry, realistic fiction, plays, myths, legends, tall tales, and songs. Knowledge of myths and legends may prove particularly vital for comprehension in advanced ELA studies.

Writing About Reading. Knowledge building isn’t just about students acquiring new facts — it’s about grappling with the nuances and complexities of the world around them. Impact integrates writing activities into lessons to help students think critically about newly acquired knowledge and demonstrate their understanding. The science of reading tells us that writing and reading skills are linked, so having students read complex texts, build knowledge, think critically, and write about what they’ve read is a powerful exercise.

Get Creative: Social studies writing activities don’t always have to be directly in response to a text. Creative writing exercises can help students consider complex topics and build knowledge, too. This history teacher had his students write “letters to home” from the perspective of civil war soldiers, incorporating contextual details and engaging in empathy.

Collaborate with Peers. Collaborative problem-solving, discourse, and civic communication are central to social studies learning objectives in Impact. They can also support knowledge building by providing students with a platform to share ideas about new concepts, articulate their understanding of the world around them, and, most importantly, consider the perspectives of their peers.

Equitable Access to Background Knowledge for Multilingual Learners

Multilingual learners often face barriers to knowledge building. To ensure these students have equitable access to background knowledge and equitable pathways to comprehension, they need appropriately scaffolded academic texts. To support teachers in providing that access, Impact can be paired with IMPACTO Estudios Sociales, a parallel, equitable program in Spanish that supports social studies instruction and Spanish language development for students who are bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural in Spanish and English. IMPACTO Estudios Sociales focuses on the same themes as IMPACT Social Studies in all units and all grades, in both print and digital formats, with fully equitable program resources and scaffolding supports for educators.

Inspire Students with Engaging, Scaffolded Digital Content

Further integrate social studies and literacy by providing students with unique content at their reading level. Actively Learn, our digital curriculum platform for grades 3–12, contains engaging, relevant, standards-aligned social studies texts, in a variety of genres, for all learners scaffolded for every student’s reading level. Teachers can find supplemental texts to enrich lessons with diverse perspectives on historical events, narratives to make history come to life, or even videos to build knowledge through alternative mediums.

Social Studies for Social Studies’ Sake

Literacy is vital to students’ academic trajectories, no matter what path they take, and comprehension is a fundamental part of their reading journey. However, at a time when social studies is being deprioritized and student performance is suffering, it’s important to note that social studies should not be limited to its worth as a cross-curricular support. The skills students learn in social studies — to engage in civic discourse, to function as informed citizens, and to think critically about the information they obtain in the outside world as it relates to decision-making and voting — are some of the most important skills they will carry with them into adulthood. Social studies should exist for the sake of social studies learning.

Dr. Kevin Colleary, an author of Impact and expert in literacy and social studies, wrote of his love for social studies:

“I received not only a solid basic education but also an even greater gift: the love of learning about the world. I learned that I belonged to a community of citizens and learned to love my country — with all its challenges and imperfections — and its promise” (Colleary 2022).

For more on social studies, visit this collection of stories.

For more on the Science of Reading, visit this collection of stories.

References

Colleary, K. (2022). Ensuring a better future: Why social studies matters. Gibbs Smith Education.

Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16–20. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.1.16

Schwartz, S. (2023, January 30). What is background knowledge, and how does it fit into the science of reading?. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/what-is-background-knowledge-and-how-does-it-fit-into-the-science-of-reading/2023/01