The Importance of Knowledge Building in Literacy

A Conversation with Dr. Doug Fisher

The Science of Reading brought a great deal of attention to word recognition — but language comprehension deserves our time and thought, too. Brandon Harvey, Senior National Curriculum Specialist at McGraw Hill, recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Doug Fisher to talk about an important and often overlooked element of comprehension: background knowledge. Here’s an overview of their recorded conversation:

Why is knowledge building important?

When we read, we activate things we know about the world and make connections with our experiences. When we read something entirely new, we ask ourselves, am I understanding this? How is this different from what I thought about the world? We use background knowledge to make sense of what we’re reading.

When we have background knowledge about a topic, we likely also have vocabulary relating to that topic. Think of it as a network of concepts and labels: Background knowledge is an understanding of concepts and vocabulary words are labels for those concepts. When we’re reading something that we already know a lot about and possess vocabulary to label, it’s of course going to make more sense to us. If the author uses some new or unique words, our background knowledge can help us make sense of those new, related ideas and words. If a reading contains unfamiliar concepts and new words, we’re going to have a harder time.

What kind of background knowledge is important for reading?

Consider the difference between your experiences — things that have happened to you during your, say, twelve or so years on Earth — and things you’ve been taught in school. We differentiate between prior knowledge, or what you learned in previous grades through formalized schooling and the funds of knowledge you’ve obtained by having experiences living in the world. Both are important, but when we talk about background knowledge or building knowledge for reading, we’re referring to the entire collection of knowledge you have.

However, as educators, while we can safely assume that students have been taught specific things in specific grades, we cannot assume that all students have had the same experiences in the world. We have to be very careful when our assessments require experience-based background knowledge or when we privilege certain experiences that some students may not have had.

How does vocabulary play a role in knowledge building?

We don’t learn words so much as we learn concepts and labels for those concepts. I think that’s why knowledge building is experiencing a resurgence: If readers have the concept, a lot of things make sense, including the vocabulary. The hard part is if you teach vocabulary in advance of reading a text, and the students don’t have the associated concept, they’re likely going to forget the word by the time they encounter it in the text.

I was talking to some educators who really provided a good example of the difference between a concept and a label. An elementary teacher was teaching a lesson on dissecting flowers. The teacher told the students that they could name the parts of the flower anything they wanted as long as they agreed as a team. (Of course, one of the groups named the pistil a fuzzy Cheeto.) At the end of the activity, the teacher said, “Some scientists got together, came up with some rules, and they named each of these parts. Your names aren’t wrong, because you agreed on them, I just want you to also know the scientific names.” This teacher told me that the associated reading following this lesson was so much faster because of this very simple activity with concepts and labeling, as opposed to rote memorization.

Are there ways teachers can make knowledge “sticky” for students over a year and beyond?

Text sets are a great strategy for knowledge building. They’re an intentionally planned set of related texts that help students develop concept knowledge by deeply exploring a subject across genres and modalities, rather than reading an array of isolated facts.

That’s sort of something we do as humans, right? I might be reading something in a book that sparks my interest, so I watch a video about it online.

Exactly. It’s a method adults use as we learn about something. We want to be careful about using video for knowledge building because if it’s too directly connected, it could give away the text and a student could be successful without reading anything at all. We need to be thinking about the essential, non-negotiable concepts and vocabulary students need to make sense of a reading.

When we consider scaffolding for knowledge building, we need to decide if we’re using front-end scaffolds, distributed scaffolds, or back-end scaffolds. We tend to do a lot of front-end scaffolding, before the lesson, where we might pre-teach vocabulary or show a video. However, front-end scaffolding sometimes reduces the rigor for students. Distributed scaffolding is more of a “just-in-time” approach, but sometimes creates too much opportunity for failure before scaffolding arrives. On the back end, we often use feedback, study skills, or graphic organizers. As teachers, we need to think more comprehensively about how we can build knowledge into the front, distribute it throughout, and come back around to it in the end. Robust scaffolding can help us focus on what knowledge students need to be successful.

That reminds me of a strategy I used to use in the classroom: anchor charts. At the beginning of a lesson, I’d ask students what they know about a topic or an essential question and document it on the chart. As we read, our thinking changed and we learned, we’d watch as the chart evolved.

Yes! Anchor charts are a great tool. This reminds me that I also want to address activating personal experiences in the name of knowledge. Sometimes we’ll ask students if they’ve ever done, seen, or experienced something before we read a text about that topic. But I worry that if we spend too much time on personal connections in advance of reading, students live in their personal worlds rather than paying attention to the concepts in the text. It’s of course unavoidable that we bring some degree of personal experience to anything we read. But too much emphasis on personal experience can also privilege kids who have had more experiences.

How does knowledge building translate into helping students become skilled readers?

All of the frameworks we’re familiar with that try to explain the processes of reading, like Scarborough’s Rope or the Simple View of Reading, have much more than knowledge building depicted in their models. Even back in 1917, Thorndike said that comprehension requires the “cooperation of forces.” We’ve known for a long time that there’s a lot at play to determine whether a reader can make sense of and use information from a text — and that it’s all interconnected. Having knowledge may or may not help you if you can’t read the words! Knowing things could make you guess, which is not what we want for our readers.

We have such a tendency to get excited about the “shiny new thing” and neglect other important pieces of reading instruction. Where do explicit comprehension skills and strategies come into play?

Students and teachers need to understand when to be strategic and when we’ve developed automaticity. I hope that people don’t feel that knowledge-building is the only part of comprehension. We often talk about the “pendulum swing” regarding our profession’s relationship with reading instruction. But I like to think of it as a spiral, where we get deeper and deeper into our understanding. So yes, right now we’re paying more attention to a few strands, but that’s because we need to learn more about them. We’re just drilling deeper and deeper into our collective knowledge about what it takes to teach the brain to read.

Knowledge is important. It’s a significant predictor of success. But all the things that go into reading are important. We must ensure we’re spending enough time building knowledge, building word recognition, and activating things like verbal reasoning to get students to process their thinking through the text.

To see the full recording of Brandon and Dr. Fisher’s conversation, along with a vast library of other webinar recordings with literacy experts, click here.

For more knowledge building resources, see: https://www.mheducation.com/prek-12/explore/science-of-literacy/knowledge-building