Evaluation

The NRP reviewed 14 studies that experimentally examined prior knowledge instruction.

Grade Level

The activation and use of what the reader knows that is relevant to what is being read has been studied experimentally for students in grades 1 through 9.  The distribution of these grade levels is: level 1, n=1; level 2, n=2; level 3, n=1; level 4, n= 6; level 5, n=2; level 6, n=2; and level 9, n=1.

Methods

Most of the studies activated knowledge prior to reading by asking the students to think about topics relevant to the passage to be read (5 studies).  The remaining studies varied in how prior knowledge was made available: teaching the relevant knowledge (2 studies), pre-reading activity (1 study), predicting based on one’s own experience (1 study), by associations made during reading (1 study), and previewing the story or text (2 studies).  Two studies did not specify their methods in the abstracts.

Experimenter Tests

Memory measures were the favored method of assessing comprehension.  Recall was used in 9 studies; question answering was used in 3 studies; achievement in content are was used in 2 studies.  All report significant effects of prior knowledge on these assessments except for one grade 4 study that used previewing the text (Spires, 1992).

Summary Evaluation of Prior Knowledge.

The activation of relevant world knowledge helps children understand and remember what they read.  The activation of prior knowledge occurs naturally in contexts where subject content is taught by the teacher and readers then read text that relates to what has been learned.