Prompting Rural Students’ Use of Background Knowledge and Experience to Support Comprehension of Unfamiliar Content

Abstract

AbstractStudents’ ability to comprehend what they read is greatly influenced by what they already know and have experienced. For this reason, teachers work to activate students’ background knowledge prior to reading. Regrettably, the pedagogical techniques available to teachers for activating students’ knowledge are quite limited. Further, those available techniques have not always been effective for students whose background knowledge and experiences are ill matched to the textual content. Thus, the purpose of this quasi‐experimental study was to investigate the effectiveness of a traditional (mobilization) and a novel (relational reasoning) activation technique, in comparison with a control group. In this study, 149 rural middle school students were assigned to one of the two experimental conditions or a control condition. The author analyzed the data using structural equation modeling with comprehension as the outcome variable. The results indicated that relational reasoning was a significantly more effective activation technique than the mobilization and control conditions for enhancing comprehension. Qualitative analyses of semistructured interviews conducted with select low‐ and high‐ performing students revealed the utility of relational reasoning, especially for low‐performing students.