Constructivism and Prior Knowledge

This week’s article summary is Text Prep.

I subscribe to the progressive tenet of constructivism—the belief that we learn best when we’re empowered to figure out ‘stuff' on our own. 

To me, true learning includes giving our brains ample freedom and time to discern the meaning and importance of a piece of knowledge, to appropriate categorize and store it, and to be able to recall, use, and apply it in multiple ways and contexts.

The conundrum for a constructivist, however, is that learning new material/content is greatly aided by our brain’s prior knowledge—and our classrooms are filled with students who have vastly different amounts of background knowledge.

The article below contains some suggestions/hints for how teachers can support ‘front loading’ background knowledge while still giving kids the time to construct understanding of new content in their own unique manner.

Joe

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Background knowledge is a make-or-break variable in students’ reading comprehension, or to quote literacy expert David Pearson “Knowledge begets comprehension begets knowledge.”

The problem is that in any given classroom, there’s wide variation in students’ prior knowledge.

That’s why frontloading is an important teacher strategy with complex texts. Frontloading provides much-needed scaffolding for students who come to our classrooms lacking access to academic knowledge in their out-of-school lives.

Frontloading should not be a foretelling of what the text says before students read; that’s the reader’s job to figure out. Instead, it builds a bridge between students’ existing knowledge and what’s required to make meaning of the text.

Below are three approaches:

Author references: Nonfiction writers often include quick references connecting new material with prior knowledge, assuming the reader will understand them. When students don’t, it’s tempting for them to glide over such references without thoughtful pauses to integrate the new with the known. Teachers need to draw attention to these references, but if they do so in an all-class discussion in which only a few knowledgeable students participate, the majority of students won’t make the connections. Far better to get have students turn and talk with a classmate to discuss what they understand before diving into a difficult text. The teacher might have students do a quick-write (A science word I connect to volcanoes is ___ because ___, or A common mistake when balancing equations is ___, so it’s important to ___) and then discuss them with partners or post them on sticky notes. Or students might construct knowledge maps, generating terms associated with a central concept in the text, for example, in a unit on the French Revolution, the word aristocracy could be linked to elites, ancient Greeks, inherited wealth.

Pooling students’ knowledge: The teacher can get small groups of students sharing what they know by posing a thought-provoking statement or question, for example, in a culinary arts class, asking students to create a T-chart on whether organic foods are healthier than non-organic foods. A variation on that activity is presenting 4-6 arguable statements on the topic (for example, If you eat too much, your stomach could burst) and asking students to gather evidence pro and con and debating the merits.

Predicting through vocabulary knowledge: Before students read a text, the teacher presents several challenging words they’ll encounter and asks teams of students to examine and speculate about them. Rather than merely telling students definitions of difficult vocabulary, this process engages students in exploring the possible relationships among the words, sharing current knowledge about known terms, and predicting possible meanings. Students can also be asked to divide the words into new, domain-specific, and known words, or pair words that are closely associated with one another. The teacher might also give students a list of challenging words in the order in which they appear in the text and have students write a predictive paragraph using all the words in sequence.