Prior Knowledge Plays a Large Role in Reading Comprehension

Schools must be responsible for helping children learn about the world in which they live. When you think about what we teach children in schools, you can divide almost everything into two categories: knowledge and skills. The abilities to read, spell, write, do math, use the computer, sing a song, play the clarinet, throw a ball, and speak a foreign language are all skills—things you can do. The understandings that there are seven continents, each state has two senators, the Civil War was fought in the 1860s, mammals are warm-blooded animals, and Martin Luther King, Jr., led the civil rights movement are all knowledge—things that you know. For many years, literacy instruction in elementary schools has focused on skills and largely ignored knowledge, particularly deep knowledge of topics. In many schools with large numbers of struggling readers, teachers are instructed to "teach the basics." The basics usually refer to the three R's—reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. The knowledge part of the curriculum, usually found in the subjects of science and social studies, are almost ignored in the primary grades of these schools.

Emphasizing the skill subjects and excluding the knowledge subjects often results in a short-term gain and a long-term deficit. Test scores in schools that emphasize skills in grades K–3 indicate that children do well through the second or third grade but test scores decline from fourth grade on. After third grade, teachers are supposed to, and do indeed try to, teach the knowledge subjects such as science and social studies. They often find, however, that even their average students can't read the textbooks or "can read them but not understand what they are reading." Children who can read the words but can't understand what they are reading are not really reading. These children who "have the skills" but who lack needed prior knowledge of critical school topics are a legacy of a primary grades curriculum that required teachers to spend all their time "on the basics."

This knowledge deficit, which usually rears its ugly head in third or fourth grade, does not disappear as children move through school. The Scholastic Achievement Test, which claims to predict how well students will do in college, is very dependent on prior knowledge. Our failure to raise SAT scores in spite of two decades of educational reform may be one of the clearest indicators that schools have focused more on skills development than on expanding children's knowledge of the world.