Academic Background Knowledge

1
Academic Background Knowledge

• The Missing Link in Reading Comprehension and
  Academic Achievement

www.fasss.org
2
Reading is Fundamental!
Reading proficiency is at the very heart of
the democratic educational enterprise, and is
rightly called the "new civil rights frontier.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr. The
Knowledge Deficit, page 3
3
The Issue

• Reading scores of
  the nations 9-year-olds have been rising for the
  past 15 years... This good news is almost
  certainly due largely to the consensus that
  finally emerged about what constitutes the best
  early instruction in how to read...
  Unfortunately, theres not the same good news for
  older readers who are struggling to comprehend
  secondary-level materials. Over the past 15
  years, reading achievement among
  13-17 year olds has changed very little.
• American Educator, Knowledge, The Next Frontier
  in Reading Comprehension

4
2006-2007 FCAT Reading Score Data Confirms
Nationwide Trends
Percentages of Students Scoring 3 and above
Note Informational text accounts for 50 of the
fifth grade readings, 60 of the seventh grade
readings, and 70 of 9th grade readings
cognitive complexity also increases with each
grade level.
5
Where we went wrong

• The fault is not with teachers...Were thinking
  about reading comprehension in the wrong way And
  until all of us in education - publishers,
  colleges of education, researchers, teachers,
  administrators, and policymakers - begin to think
  about it differently and, therefore, go about
  improving it differently, reading comprehension
  wont improveand teachers will continue to be
  pilloried.
• American Educator, Knowledge, The Next
  Frontier in Reading Comprehension

6
The ProblemThe Knowledge Deficit

• Content is not adequately addressed in
  American schools, especially in the early grades.
  
• Inadequate attention to building students
  content knowledge is the main reason why the
  reading scores of 13-17 year-olds on the NAEP
  have not budged in years.
• This neglect of knowledge is a major source of
  inequity, at the heart of the achievement gap
  between Americas poor and non-poor.
  
• Hirsch, Building Knowledge, American Educator,
  Spring 2006, p. 9

7
What IS Reading Comprehension?

• Being a good decoder does not ensure one will
  become a skilled reader
• Reading Comprehension depends upon Knowledge --
  of words and the world
• Experts estimate one needs to understand 90 of
  words in a passage to infer the meaning of the
  other 10
• When word knowledge falls below 90 in a passage,
  comprehension falls precipitously
  
• Building Knowledge, American Educator, Spring
  2006

8
Importance of Academic Background Knowledge

• Formal comprehension skills can only take
  students so far knowledge is what enables their
  comprehension to keep increasing.
• Knowledge of content and of vocabulary acquired
  through learning about content are fundamental to
  successful reading comprehension.
• Reading comprehension requires a student to
  possess a lot of vocabulary and a lot of
  background knowledge. No amount of reading
  comprehension skills instruction can compensate
  for lack of knowledge.
• American Educator, Building Knowledge, Spring
  2006

9
What is corandic? What does corandic grank from?
How do garkers excarp the tarances from the
corite? What does the slorp finally frast? What
is coranda?
Directions Use your reading comprehension skills
to understand the passage.

• Chapter 1 Corandic
•  
• Corandic is an emurient grof with many fribs it
  granks from corite,
• which garkers excarp by glarcking the corite and
  starping it in tranker-
• clarped storbs.  The tarances starp a chark,
  which is expanged with
• wortes, branking a storp.  This storp is garped
  through several other
• corusees, finally frasting a pragety, blickant
  crankle coranda.
•            
• Coranda is a cargurt, grinkling corandic and
  borigten.  The
• corandic is nacerated from the borigen by means
  of loracity.  This
• garkers finally thrap a glick, bracht, glupous
  grapant, corandic, which
• granks in many starps.
•  

You probably answered correctly but still do
not understand what you read. This is what many
students experience
10
Read and Understand?

• Definition Planet
• Any of the non-luminous bodies that revolve
  around the sun. The term planet is sometimes used
  to include the asteroids, but excludes the other
  members of the solar system, comets and
  meteoroids. By extension, any similar body
  discovered revolving around another star would be
  called a planet.

11
On Understanding the Definition? A well-informed
person would learn a good deal from this entry
if, for example, he was uncertain about whether
asteroids, comets, and meteoroids should be
called planets. A novice, even one who "thinks
scientifically" would learn less. Since he
wouldn't know what planets are, he probably
wouldn't know what asteroids, comets, and
meteoroids are. Even the simple phrase "revolving
around another star" would be mystifying, since
he probably wouldn't know that the sun is a star.
Equally puzzling would be the phrase "other
members of the solar system," since the term
"solar system" already requires knowing what a
planet is. An imaginative novice would no doubt
make some fortunate guesses after a rather long
time. But, looking things up turns out to have an
element of Catch 22 you already need to know
something about the subject to look it up
effectively. American Educator, You Can
Always Look It UpOr Can You?, Spring 2000.
12
Can you determine the Main Idea?
A student's actual ability to find the main idea
of a passage is not a formal ability to follow
procedures that will elicit the main idea but the
ability to understand what the text says. E.D.
Hirsch, The Knowledge Deficit, ch. 6
13
SAMPLE READING PASSAGE There is a path that
starts in Maine and ends in Georgia, 2,167 miles
later. This path is called the Appalachian Trail.
If you want, you can walk the whole way, although
only some people who try to do this actually make
it, because it is so far, and they get tired. The
idea for the trail came from a man named Benton
MacKaye. In 1921 he wrote an article about how
people needed a nearby place where they could
enjoy nature and take a break from work. He
thought the Appalachian Mountains would be
perfect for this.
14
No repetitions of classroom exercises will help
the test-taker who does not know what hiking is,
or what low, tree covered mountains are like
(they are not like the snow-covered Himalaya-type
mountains most often pictured in books), or where
Maine and Georgia are. Classroom practice in
strategies cannot make up for the student's lack
of the background knowledge needed to understand
this passage, and no instruction in strategies is
required to answer the questions quickly and
accurately if the student knows about hiking, the
Appalachians, Maine, and Georgia. The inferences
that we make when we hear or read speech are
based on a situation model particular to that
utterance, derived from relevant knowledge about
the domain of the passage. The comprehension
skills that students are supposed to learn by
practicing "comprehension skills" cannot lead to
high test performance, because they do not lead
to actual comprehension.Hirsch, The Knowledge
Deficit, ch. 6
15
What does this mean?

• Jones sacrificed and
• knocked in two runs

16
Domain Knowledge is Important!

• MORE than vocabulary is needed to understand
  text.
• Jones sacrificed and knocked in two runs
  assumes the reader has a great store of
  background information domain knowledge.
  Sacrifice has a different connotation depending
  upon whether the context is Biblical or Baseball.
• Domain knowledge enables readers to make sense
  of word combinations and choose among multiple
  possible word meanings.
• 
  
• 
  The Knowledge Deficit,
  p. 17

17
Just how important IS domain knowledge?

• Can you tell what this means?
• THE DIFFICULTY OF YOUR SET COULD BE INCREASED IF
  YOU DO A JAM FOLLOWED BY A PEACH.

18
Translation . . . .

• The point values you can earn on your gymnastics
  routine can be bigger if you include, in
  sequence, two particular skills on the uneven
  parallel bars the "jam," which leaves the
  gymnast sitting on the high bar and the "peach,"
  where the gymnast moves from the high bar to the
  low bar.
• Had you figured it out? Did you know what
  the statement meant? If so, you may have already
  possessed the background knowledge about
  gymnastics that clued you in to the meaning of
  the statement.

From http//curry.edschool.virginia.edu/go/readq
uest/intro.html
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What do you need to know to make sense of this
photograph?
20
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Chapter 1 -
Allusions Historical References

• Andrew Jackson 7th President of the United
  States (1829-1837)
• Battle of Hastings a decisive battle in the
  Norman Conquests of England in 1066
• disturbance between the North and the South The
  Civil War (1861-1865)
• Dracula the 1931 film version of the famous
  vampire story
• flivver another name for a Model-T Ford
• Jamaica an island country in the West Indies,
  south of Cuba
• John Wesley (1702-1791) Founder of the Methodist
  Church
• Merlin King Arthur's adviser, prophet and
  magician
• Mobile a city in southwest Alabama
• no money to buy it with an allusion to the Great
  Depression
• nothing to fear but fear itself an allusion to
  President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Inaugural
  Address
• Pensacola a city in northwest Florida
• Philadelphia a city in southeast Pennsylvania
• stumphole whiskey illegally made and sold
  whiskey that would be hidden in the holes of tree
  stumps
• Tuscaloosa a city in central Alabama

How can a person read and have a good
understanding of the first chapter of this
classic novel, let alone the rest of the book,
without a basic understanding of history?
21
10th Grade FCAT Reading Passage What knowledge
is assumed here? THE ORIGIN OF COTTON is
something of a mystery. There is evidence that
people in India and Central and South America
domesticated separate species of the plant
thousands of years ago. Archaeologists have
discovered fragments of cotton cloth more than
4,000 years old in coastal Peru and at Mohenjo
Daro in the Indus Valley. By A.D. 1500, cotton
had spread across the warmer regions of the
Americas, Eurasia, and Africa. Today cotton is
the worlds major nonfood crop, providing half of
all textiles. In 1992, 80 countries produced a
total of 83 million bales, or almost 40 billion
pounds. The business revenue generated - some 50
billion dollars in the United States alone - is
greater than that of any other field crop. Most
of the five billion pounds that U.S. mills spin
and weave into fabric each year ends up as
clothing. Cotton is a wonderful classic, says
Adrienne Vittadini, a New York designer of
women?s sportswear, who uses cotton in 65 percent
of her collection. It takes color beautifully.
You can achieve a lot of different textures just
by knowing what sort of cotton to use. You have
combed cotton, with a dull finish high twist
cotton, with a crepey finish all sorts of cotton
boucles for hand knitting. For any reputable
company, cotton signifies quality. Its our bread
and butter. But cotton spins its way into much
more than apparel. It makes book bindings,
fishnets, handbags, coffee filters, lace, tents,
curtains, and diapers. Few other fibers endure
tough conditions as well as cotton, perhaps the
main reason it figures so prominently in the
medical supply industry. Cotton is used for
bandages and sutures for exactly the same reason
its used in textiles Its durable in a lot of
different environments, says Dr. Thomas Stair,
head of emergency medicine at Georgetown
University Hospital in Washington, D.C. Such
attributes may explain why firefighters once
preferred cotton fire hoses The fibers soaked up
enough water to keep the hose wet and protect it
from flames. Modern fire hoses are usually made
from synthetics, which are less expensive and
last longer than cotton. But U.S. armed forces
still use cotton hoses on their ships, where
scorching, sunbaked decks melt the man-made
material. Scientists have found that cotton may
even clean up oil spills better than
polypropylene fibers.
22
The New Colossus1 Not like the brazen giant
of Greek fame,2 With conquering limbs astride
from land to land3 Here at our sea-washed,
sunset gates shall stand4 A mighty woman with a
torch, whose flame5 Is the imprisoned lightning,
and her name6 Mother of Exiles. From her
beacon-hand7 Glows world-wide welcome her mild
eyes command8 The air-bridged harbor that twin
cities frame.9 "Keep ancient lands, your storied
pomp!" cries she10 With silent lips. "Give me
your tired, your poor,11 Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,12 The wretched refuse
of your teeming shore.13 Send these, the
homeless, tempest-tost to me,14 I lift my lamp
beside the golden door!-Emma Lazarus, 1883
A Popular poem read in Language Arts History
classrooms what knowledge is needed to
understand it?
23
Cognitive Frameworks - Schema

• Knowledge is stored in cognitive frameworks
  called schema
• Learners draw on this schema to make inferences
  and predictions, and to organize, reflect, and
  elaborate on new information.
• The schema provide a structure or guide for
  understanding and comprehension.
• The reader selects a schema that is appropriate
  and then fills in the information.
• (R. Billmeyer, 1996)

24
Schema Example

• Read the paragraph below and fill in the missing
  words
•  
• The problems that confront p_______ in raising
  ch______ from
• in______ to adult life are not easy to ______. 
  Both fa_______ and
• m_______ meet with many di_______ in their
  concern for satisfactory
• pro_______ from the e_______stage to later life. 
  It is important that
• young ch_______ should have plenty of s_______
  and good f_______
• for healthy growth.  B_______ and g_______ should
  not occupy the same
• b_______ or sleep in the same r_______.  They are
  often afraid of the
• d________.

25
Schema Example

• Did you get them all correct? Why not?
•  
• The problems that confront poultrymen raising
  chickens from
• incubation to adult life are not easy to
  summarize.  Both farmers and
• merchants meet with many difficulties in their
  concern for satisfactory
• promotion from the egg stage to later life.  It
  is important that
• young chicks should have plenty of sunshine and
  good feed
• for healthy growth.  Banties and geese should not
  occupy the same
• barynyard or sleep in the same roost.  They are
  often afraid of the
• dark.

26
Whats The Point?

• There is no generalized reading ability. Reading
  comprehension is domain specific...

27
Background Knowledge The Achievement Gap

• The Matthew Effect- Those who already have good
  language understanding will gain still more
  language proficiency, while those who lack
  initial understanding will fall further
  and further behind.
• (The Knowledge Deficit, Hirsch, 2006)

28
The Matthew Effect
An allusion to the idea which states those who
already have will gain more, those who have not
will lose even what they have.

• Students who have a great deal of background
  knowledge in a given subject area are likely to
  learn new information readily and quite well.
  The converse is also true.
• (Building Background Knowledge for
  Academic Achievement, Marzano, 2004)
• Better readers who know 90 or more vocabulary
  through prior knowledge have an easier
  opportunity, through inference, to learn more
  words the other 10!
• Those who only know 80 or even less of such
  words will fail to comprehend these words and
  MOREOVER will have less opportunity to learn NEW
  words / concepts.
• Richer readers will thus continually become
  richer with every reading passage
• Poorer readers will inevitably fall further
  behind with every reading assignment!
  
• (The
  Knowledge Deficit , p. 24-25)

29
The Principle of Compounding
Compound Interest the Matthew Effect

• Richer readers have gained increasingly rich
  vocabulary due to compounding just as wealthy
  people can financially increase their savings
  faster than the poor
• A invests 10 in a bank at 5 interest
• B invests 100 in a bank at 5 interest
• The 90 difference grows to 146 in 10 years
• Vocabulary growth is similarly affected
  
• 
  
  
• (Background Knowledge, p. 14)

30
Building Vocabulary

• Anne Cunningham Keith Stanovich have shown that
  a students vocabulary level in 2nd grade is a
  reliable predictor of academic performance in
  11th Grade!
• A person learns from 60,000 100,000 words by
  12th grade.
• Betty Hart and Todd Risley describe a 30 million
  word gap among the 3 year olds in rich and poor
  families! (The Early Catastrophe The 30
  Million Word Gap by Age 3).
  
• The three year old children from families on
  welfare not only had smaller vocabularies than
  did children of the same age in professional
  families, but they were also adding words more
  slowly.

31
Who Has Been Hurt the Most Who Has the Most to
Gain!

• NAEP indicates a general lack of
  reading proficiency among all students along with
  the common achievement gaps found among African
  Americans and Hispanics.
• - White students 41 Proficient
• - Hispanic students 15 Proficient
• - African American students 12 Proficient

(The Knowledge Deficit, p. 3)
32
Importance of Academic Background Knowledge

• Background knowledge is also linked to
  occupation and overall income.
• (Marzano, 2004)
• 40 of those born into the bottom economic fifth
  will remain at that level as adults.
• (M.
  Schmoker, 2006)

33
Where weve gone wrong

• Existing reading programs . . . fail to
  systematically exploit the need for relevant
  background knowledge as a fundamental insight
  into the nature of reading.
• Disparagement of factual knowledge, as found in
  books, has long been a strong current
  in American thought
• (Building Knowledge, Hirsch, 2006)

34
Problems with Texts

• Hundreds of pages of basal text offer up trivial
  stories that provide little opportunity for
  children to build their store of knowledge. They
  persist, unit after unit, in asking students to
  predict, summarize, infer, etc. as if an
  endless use of these strategies will increase
  students reading comprehension ability.
• 
  
• E.D. Hirsh, Jr. American Educator, Spring 2006,
  p. 10
  
• K. Walsh, American Educator, Spring 2003, p.
  24-27

35
Table of Contents of the FLDOE 3rd Grade Summer
Remedial Reading Packet
36
Reviewing the Content

• Content knowledge in the D.O.E. remedial
  packet included such already familiar topics as
  Peanut Butter and Jelly, Ready for School,
  Dans Diner, In the Kitchen, Dogs and Cats,
  Cookies, A Fish Tank, Ice Crème, Grandpas
  Farm, and The Haircut. Students basically
  already know about most the content in these
  stories. Theyve learned little or no additional
  knowledge from their summer reading experience!
  Theyve had the experience of repeatedly
  practicing reading strategies, but the amount
  of background knowledge theyve accumulated has
  hardly increased.
• In keeping with our understanding of the
  Matthew Effect a better program to ensure
  continuation of the Fourth Grade Slump could
  hardly be devised.

37
The Remedial Reading packet for Third Graders
published by the Florida D.O.E. seems to fulfill
the following basic criticism Hirsch levels at
most Basal Reading programs today.
Hirsch writes in The Knowledge Deficit, pages
71-72 The disjointed topics and stories that
one finds in current reading programs seem
designed mainly to appeal to the knowledge that
young readers may already have, such as "Going to
School" and "Jenny at the Supermarket." The
programs do not make a systematic effort to
convey coherently, grade by grade, the knowledge
that newspapers, magazines, and serious radio and
TV programs assume American readers and listeners
possess.
Note Hirsch examines Floridas reading
achievement in Essential Reading, which is
Chapter 5 of the Koret Task Force Report for
Florida, http//media.hoover.org/documents/ktf_flo
rida_book_85.pdf or CLICK HERE
Reforming Education in Florida A Study Prepared
by the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, Hoover
Institution 2006
38
Consistency is Necessary

• Words are learned up to 4 times faster in a
  familiar context than in an
  unfamiliar one.

• Suppose, for example, you are reading to
  five-year-old Dmitri a story about kings and
  queens. If you extend that topic for the next few
  days by reading more true and fictional stories
  about kings and queens, how they lived, and what
  they did, the chances are that Dmitri will
  increase his general knowledge and vocabulary
  faster than if you read about zebras the next
  day, Laplanders the day after that, and so on . .
  . This is yet another reason that a coherent,
  content-oriented curriculum is the most effective
  way to raise reading achievement.
• Hirsch, The Knowledge Deficit, Ch. 5

39
Literature Basal Content Also to Blame
Informational Text Studies since the mid-1980s
have consistently shown that basal
readers include very little informational text.
For example, Flood and Lapp (1986) looked at
eight basals finding that narrative selections
accounted for more than 66 percent of the pages.
Smith (1991), who looked at content of
three basals for grades one, three, and five,
found that 15 to 20 percent was nonfiction
content. More recently, Moss and Newton (2002)
examined how many selections from international
trade books were included in six popular basal
readers published from 1995 to 1997. As the
chart on the right shows, informational
Literature is relatively sparse.
Susan Neuman, How We Neglect Knowledge (2006)
p. 24
40
Schools Can Make a Difference!

• An analysis of research conducted over a 35-year
  period demonstrates that schools that are highly
  effective produce results that almost entirely
  overcome the effects of students backgrounds.
• Robert Marzano, What Works in Schools, 2003

41
Focus on Essential Learning

• A a meta-analysis of 35 years of educational
  research indicates a guaranteed and viable
  curriculum is the school level factor with the
  most impact on student achievement.
• Robert Marzano, What Works in Schools, 2003

42
Building Background Knowledge

• given the relationship between
  academic background knowledge and academic
  achievement, one can make the case that it should
  be at the top of any list of interventions
  intended to enhance student achievement. If not
  addressed by schools, academic background
  knowledge can create great advantages for some
  students and great disadvantages for others.
  (emphasis added)
• Robert Marzano, Building Background Knowledge,
  2006

43
Importance of Academic Background Knowledge

• There is a well-researched connection between
  background knowledge and academic achievement.
• Studies show a direct correlation between a
  students level of background knowledge and
  academic achievement.
• (Marzano, Building Background Knowledge, 2004)

44
Determining Student Achievement

• The correlation between academic achievement and
  socioeconomic status (.42) is only about half the
  correlation between academic achievement and
  general knowledge (.81).
• You Can Always Look It UpOr Can You?,
  Hirsch, 2000

45
Importance of Academic Background Knowledge

• According to Hirsch, the only way to improve
  scores in reading comprehension and to narrow the
  reading gap between groups is systematically to
  provide children with the wide-ranging, specific
  background knowledge they need to comprehend what
  they read.
• Imparting broad knowledge to all children is the
  single most effective way to narrow the
  competence gap between demographic groups through
  schooling.
• The Knowledge Deficit, 2006

46
Content Literacy

• Improvements in higher-level reading skills
  cannot come about simply by an emphasis on
  reading in isolation from the other work students
  do in school. Students must learn to read in all
  content areas. (emphasis added)
• (Billmeyer, 1996)

47
How Much Background Knowledge?

• Background knowledge is multi-dimensional and
  its value is contextual.
• Background knowledge manifests itself as
  vocabulary knowledge (academic vocabulary).
• Even surface-level background knowledge is
  useful.
• (Marzano, 2004)

48
taken from Building Background Knowledge for
Academic Achievement, Robert Marzano, 2004. The
number of academic terms/concepts in the table
were derived from National standards documents
taken from each subject area
49
8.6
9.7
10
32
10.8
7.7
4.3
3.5
3.0
6.9
2.6
50
RECOMMENDATIONS

• Knowledge is power

• Sir Frances Bacon, 1597

51
Koret Task Force Study on K-12 Education in
Florida, 2006

• Executive Summary, Recommendation 10
• The states reading program, Just Read,
  Florida! has done much to enhance reading
  instruction, first in the elementary grades and
  then at the middle school level. It now requires
  that any students in grades 6 through 12 who have
  phonological problems enroll in an intensive
  reading course. As it continues to implement
  these policies, it should both seek student
  mastery of phonological skills (through 12th
  grade, if needed) and the acquisition of
  appropriate knowledge at each grade level, an aim
  that is not currently emphasized in the Just
  Read, Florida! guidelines but is an essential
  element in enabling students to read at grade
  level as they advance to middle school and high
  school.

52
Recommendations
If schools wish to meet the adequate-yearly-progr
ess requirement, they should systematically teach
and then test for the general knowledge that
leads to proficient reading comprehension. The
monitors of NCLB compliance should recognize that
adequate yearly progress in early reading is in
fact occurring if students show that they are not
only decoding well but also gaining general
knowledge as demonstrated on curriculum-based
tests of specific knowledge rather than simply on
reading tests. Hirsch, The Knowledge
Deficit, ch. 6
53
Recommendations
John Bishop, of Cornell University, has shown
that educational systems which require definite
content standards and use curriculum-based
content tests to determine whether the curriculum
has been learned greatly improve achievement for
all students, including those from less
advantaged backgrounds. Hirsch, The
Knowledge Deficit
54
(No Transcript)
55
References

• American Federation of Teachers, American
  Educator (Spring 2006). Knowledge The Next
  Frontier in Reading Comprehension
• Billmeyer, R. (1996). Teaching reading in the
  content areas If not me, then who?
• Hirsch, E.D. (2006). Building Knowledge
  (American Federation of Teachers, American
  Educator, Spring 2006, p. 8-21,28-29,50-51).
• Hirsch, E.D. (2006). The Knowledge Deficit
  Closing the shocking education gap for American
  children, Houghton Mifflin Publishing
• Hirsch, E.D. (2000). You Can Always Look it
  Upor Can You? (American Federation of Teachers,
  American Educator, Spring 2000, pp. 4-9).
• Marzano, R. (2004). Building Background
  Knowledge for Academic Achievement.
• Marzano, R. (2003). What Works in Schools
  Translating Research in to Action.
• Neuman, Susan (2006) How We Neglect Knowledge,
  American Educator, Spring 2006
• Schmoker, M. (2006). Results now How we can
  achieve unprecedented improvements in teaching
  and learning.

56
References . . . continued

• American Federation of Teachers, American
  Educator (Spring 2006).
• (Articles are Hyperlinked)
• Knowledge The Next Frontier in Reading
  Comprehension
• Building Knowledge
• What Do Reading Comprehension Tests Measure?
  Knowledge
• Engaging Kids with Content "The Kids Love It"
• How We Neglect Knowledgeand Why
• Why This Matters Most for Poor Children

www.fasss.org