This video explains the importance of building background knowledge for reading comprehension and presents four activities that educators can use in their classrooms to achieve this. It emphasizes a content-oriented approach that makes connections throughout the school year to deepen students' understanding and improve their reading skills.
This video explains the importance of building background knowledge for reading comprehension and presents four activities that educators can use in their classrooms to achieve this. It emphasizes a content-oriented approach that makes connections throughout the school year to deepen students' understanding and improve their reading skills.
Narrator: Successful reading instruction isn't just about getting students to identify the main idea or cite evidence from isolated texts. It's also about building a rich foundation of background knowledge. That's because readers need to make inferences, drawing connections to what they already know to understand the text. In a groundbreaking recent study, elementary students who read about dinosaurs built a deeper understanding of how scientists collect data to study past events. Seeing how ideas were connected and can reinforce each other boosted their reading comprehension scores by 18% compared to their peers. But how can you build more background knowledge in your classroom? Literacy experts recommend a sustained, thoughtfully sequenced, content-oriented approach, one that makes connections throughout the school year. Find through lines in your curriculum. If students will read about Roman emperors in the winter, prepare them with related lessons on civilization building, governance, and codes of law in the fall. Here are four activities to help you get started. One engaging pre-lesson activity uses cut-out hexagons, each covering a single term or concept, to explore novel insights. Working in small groups, students write core ideas on each hexagon and then link related ones together. If students are learning about animal habitats, for example, they can arrange animals by biome and investigate similarities and differences. Vocabulary games can also help students become familiar with keywords they may encounter. Try a multimodal approach. Use photos to introduce new words or have students draw the words. Keep the dictionaries away until students have had a chance to work out the definitions themselves. Try setting up tables with engaging materials, such as comics, photo collections, poetry, introductory videos, and news articles to introduce students to challenging topics as they rotate through. These give students multiple entry points while building familiarity with key events and people. Using graphic organizers like anchor charts and concept maps encourages students to scope out the conceptual terrain, helping them spot the difference between main ideas and support details, or see how big ideas relate to each other. When students explicitly look for connections between topics and build new knowledge upon prior understanding, that scaffolding can improve factual recall and comprehension. By gathering lots of information prior to reading about a topic, students fill a deep reservoir of vocabulary and thematic knowledge, enhancing their ability to understand future texts that touch upon the same concepts.
