Build Background Knowledge Research Articles

Implementation of a Text-Based Content Intervention in Secondary Social Studies Classes

We describe teacher fidelity (adherence to the components of the treatment as specified by the research team) based on a series of studies of a multicomponent intervention, Promoting Acceleration of Comprehension and Content Through Text (PACT), with middle and high school social studies teachers and their students. Findings reveal that even with highly specified materials and implementing practices that are aligned with effective reading comprehension and content instruction, teachers' fidelity was consistently low for some components and high for others. Teachers demonstrated consistently high implementation fidelity and quality for the instructional components of building background knowledge (comprehension canopy) and teaching key content vocabulary (essential words), whereas we recorded consistently lower fidelity and quality of implementation for the instructional components of critical reading and knowledge application.

Building Background Knowledge: Pre-teaching Physical Education Concepts to Students with Visual Impairments

The importance of pre-teaching to facilitate concept development by building background knowledge and to promote inclusion has been acknowledged in the professional literature related to the education of students with visual impairments. However, there is no research that describes how teachers can use pre-teaching with students who are blind or visually impaired in the areas of physical education and orientation and mobility. The term pre-teaching has become a buzzword because it is largely undefined as it relates to the field of visual impairment, which includes orientation and mobility. Teachers know they should be pre-teaching, but they don’t know how. This article explains the collaborative pre-teaching process and techniques that can be used to facilitate concept development for the inclusion of students with visual disabilities in general physical education classes.

Using a STEM-Based Approach to Make Recycling Metallic Elements Relevant

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Recycling metals is a major business in the United States. Copper, iron, aluminum, and other metals get recycled in various ways. Planned garbage pick-ups, random hauls by individuals to a scrap metal facility, and various organizational recycling of scrap metal (e.g., aluminum can)/clean-up drives are some of the ways metals get reused. This article describes a series of activities that incorporate multiple subjects, which focus on real-world experiences. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) is an emphasis area, as students are actively involved in understanding some of the costs behind the processes of recycling various metal products. A final classroom-tested activity based on shipping Lincoln pennies for copper reclamation is described in detail. Activity 1: Building background knowledge Begin the activity by asking students a series of questions to determine their background knowledge concerning metallic elements. Some sample questions asked in the past are: * What is a metallic element? * What are examples of metallic elements? * How do you determine a metallic element's value? * Where are metallic elements found? * What are some by-products of metallic elements? (You may have to give students a specific example [e.g, an aluminum bat is a by-product of the metallic element aluminum] to gain an understanding of the word by-product. A more difficult concept would be by-products made from metallic alloys [e.g., a bronze statue].) Assign groups of three students to research background information on metallic elements such as aluminum, nickel, silver, gold, mercury, copper, zinc, tin, lead, and iron and do a presentation on them. To help lead discussions in Activity 3, one group should research copper and another group should research aluminum. Specific roles that should be matched with student interests are: * Lead computer researcher: a student who excels at using technology to research a topic. All group members should assist. * Lead writer/compiler/media developer: a student who is good at synthesizing information and putting it in a visually appealing format. All group members should assist. * Lead presenter: a student who tends to be gregarious, outgoing, and extroverted in nature. All group members should assist. Some of the information students should investigate and questions they should answer are: 1. What is the chemical symbol for the metallic element? 2. What are chemical and physical properties of your assigned metallic element? (e.g., melting point, state at room temperature, density, etc.). 3. What is the current price of the element on the commodities market (see Resources)? Students have noticed that these prices fluctuate and sometimes are priced based on unusual units of measurement (e.g., Troy ounces). 4. What are three common uses for the metallic element by itself? This is a tricky question in that most metal products are not a 100% pure Most students determine that a metallic element is mixed to form an alloy of some type. 5. What are three common uses for the metals when combined with other elements to form compounds? The word compound may be new for some students. Provide a few examples (e.g., all-metal compounds such as bronze, which is made of tin and copper, and carbon steel, which is made of iron and carbon, or other types of compounds, such as silver nitrate, which are made of the metal silver and a nonmetal nitrate (combination of nitrogen/oxygen), etc. 6. Where is the metallic element mined? Which state or country is the greatest producer of the metallic element? 7. Provide a timeline-based history of the metallic element. There should be a minimum of four important moments in history regarding the metallic element. 8. Develop a presentation using presentational software (e. …

Building Background Knowledge

AbstractThis article make a case for the importance of background knowledge in children's comprehension. It suggests that differences in background knowledge may account for differences in understanding text for low‐ and middle‐income children. It then describes strategies for building background knowledge in the age of common core standards.

Pre-Reading Power: One Classroom's Experience

Because of the Common Core State Standards there is a renewed emphasis on the importance of visual literacies in today's classrooms. Students need prior knowledge before approaching these types of texts. This article describes the results of one 6th-grade language arts class's engagement in pre-reading prior to viewing a theatrical performance. The study examined whether obtaining background knowledge through print can be used effectively to increase the knowledge of drama, visual literacy, and nonprint text. The study utilized an experimental control-group design; t-test results revealed that using pre-reading as a comprehension strategy is more effective than just viewing drama. In addition, factorial ANOVA results showed that the treatment did not signficantly interact with reading ability or gender. Overall, this 6th-grade class's comprehension skills were enhanced with the help of pre-reading. This study indicates that pre-reading is a powerful strategy that can build background knowledge and ultimately increase comprehension of visual literacy for all students, and it and offers insight for a larger study.

Fifth Graders as App Designers

Instructional designers are increasingly considering how to include students as participants in the design of instructional technologies. This study provides a lens into participatory design with students by examining how students conceptualized learning applications in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by designing paper prototypes of a learning application related to circuits and electricity. Eighty-nine fifth grade students, including students with learning disabilities and English language learners, participated in this study. Findings of this study indicated that all students conceptualized learning applications as a game and built scaffolds into the gameplay to encourage both content mastery and advancement in the game. Each of the paper prototypes that the students developed provided opportunities for progressive complexity of gameplay related to electricity and circuits as well as options for customization and building background knowledge. Finally, this article identifies implications of these results and considerations for future research.

Using Academic Notebooks to Support Achievement and Promote Positive Classroom Environments

Authors examine how the use of academic notebooks impacts collaborative learning experiences of young adolescents.Picture the following: Actively engaged seventh graders, accessing resources that they created, using notebooks to prepare for their upcoming interviews with local community members who played a role in the Civil Rights Movement. Students work in small groups, leafing through their oft-used academic notebooks to find detailed information about people and events that relate to the people they will soon interview. Students take excellent care of their notebooks; they keep them organized and leave them in a designated location so that the notebooks are easily found when needed. No two notebooks look alike, though each has the same components; students' own styles shape their notebooks, though the teacher takes care to assure the quality of work contained within. If you ask one of these students about the value of their notebook, they speak emphatically about the wealth of information they contain, visibly showing pride in their creations. These notebooks connect students to the material, to the classroom, and to each other.Middle grades teachers, faced with increasingly heterogeneous classrooms, need specific tools and resources that support learning for all students. As depicted in the opening vignette, in this article we examine how a specific type of notebook-an academic notebook-can help promote in-depth academic learning. We describe how academic notebooks were used with a diverse seventh grade social studies class engaged in a multi-month investigation of the Civil Rights Movement.Notebooks are commonly used in middle school classrooms as a place for students to record information delivered via lecture, classroom discussion, or independent work. A primary reason teachers ask students to use notebooks is to capture and organize information. In many cases, students are expected to use these tools with little direction, follow-through, or support; they are solely responsible for deciding what to put in their notebook, managing and caring for it, and knowing when and how to use its contents (Klentschy, 2010). For students unsure of how to do this independently, conventional notebooks can actually create a barrier to learning. One question we tried to answer through our implementation of academic notebooks was How can middle school students be best supported in the efficient and organized use of notebooks in the specific context of an extended collaborative project, and as a crucial resource for learning, in general? We found that employing explicit, teacher-driven strategies and structures to help students organize and make sense of their learning was the answer.What Are Academic Notebooks?Although various words could be used to describe the type of notebooks we discuss in this article, we employ Marzano's (2004) term academic notebooks. In our case, which mirrors Marzano's use of academic notebooks as a tool for building background knowledge, student notebooks had the following characteristics. They were (1) teacher directed, though student created; (2) a consistent place for students to put ideas and information they gathered, creating a warehouse of easily retrieved learning; and (3) a tool for both teacher and student to track learning. Students' notebooks started out as blank composition-style notebooks-bound, with lined pages and no removable pages. Slowly, over the course of the project, notebooks became filled with handwritten notes; academic vocabulary; graphic organizers; glued-in, teacher-created rubrics; and formative and summative assessments related to specific learning targets and the overall goals of the unit. Students rarely took their notebooks out of the classroom. Each page was labeled so that information was easily retrievable.Teacher-guided notebooks of many varieties have been shown to support different content areas at the middle level (e.g., Klentschy, 2010). …

Building Background Knowledge within Literature Circles

The authors examined the strength of literature circles in developing background knowledge an acknowledged sticking point in the development of understanding for middle graders with a special focus on the literature circle role of investigator, where it is student initiative and not teacher direction that guides comprehension. Observing students who were reading Maniac Magee with a teacher who supported reading in literature circles, the authors concluded that being an investigator allowed students to personally learn about topics, words, and people that were important to understanding the novel, and that by treating the novel as a puzzle to solve, they developed an appreciation for the authors research and skill, broadened their own background knowledge, routinely listened and responded to others in their circle, and developed as critical readers. An added bonus was the development of a homeschool dialogue.

The Educational Relevance of Communication Disorders

The Educational Relevance of Communication Disorders

Books and Computer Response Activities That Support Literacy Development

Computer activities related to literature can enhance young children's literacy development. Internet sites, multimedia games, and talking books all add to story experiences. Indeed, when shared readings of picture storybooks include Internet “field trips” about book themes or topics, children have unique occasions to build background knowledge that supports story comprehension. The books described here include annotations for age-appropriate computer resources and activities.

Writing in AAC

Writing in AAC

Learning Words From Books: The Effects of Read-Aloud on Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition

This study compares the gains made in second language vocabulary as a direct result of different literacy lessons implementing two bilingual methodologies: concurrent translation and preview-review. Students in the three randomly selected third-grade classes in the Los Angeles area were chosen to serve as the control (no treatment), concurrent translation, and preview-review groups. The children were given a pre test to assess their knowledge of selected vocabulary items. After the administration of the pre-test students in Group 1 (control) listened to a story in English with no intervention or explanation of the story. Students in Group 2 listened to the same story in English with the reader using the concurrent method (translating the story from one language to the other). Group 3 heard the same story in English after having the teacher build background knowledge by previewing important points and difficult vocabulary in Spanish (preview). They also reviewed the story in Spanish after the reading in order to reinforce important points (review). All three groups were given a post test of the same vocabulary items after the treatment and one week later to examine gains in scores. Results indicate that not only did the students in the preview-review group score significantly higher than the control and concurrent translation groups, the concurrent translation group scored the lowest of all three groups and improved slightly one week after treatment. These findings demonstrate positive implications for the use of strategies which build background knowledge as a means of teaching second language vocabulary to English learners.

Pearls in shells: Preparing teachers to accommodate gifted low income populations

Low income gifted populations present special challenges for classroom teachers. Like pearls hidden in shells, they are frequently difficult to discover, but certainly worth the search. This article is the story of an independent study undertaken by a pre‐service teacher. The study began with the teacher candidate building background knowledge with a professor who had previously worked with low income gifted students in a public school classroom. The pre‐service teacher then conducted a field study in a school with an at‐risk population where she worked with gifted students in a regular classroom. The authors suggest that improving teacher approaches to low income gifted students can best be accomplished through including opportunities for developing a theoretical framework at the university level and applying such knowledge in the public school system.

Using Refugee Stories in Social Work Education

ABSTRACT Facilitating the adjustment of refugees can be a challenging task for social workers because these involuntary migrants are often both culturally different and psychologically traumatized. Powerful stories about the refugee experience can, therefore, be valuable tools in the preparation of social workers. They can be used to build background knowledge, because they document the experiences of refugees and the sociopsychological effects of those experiences. They can also be used to complement and illustrate theory and are especially valuable, because they permit us to see the receiving country and its agencies from a refugee perspective. Last, they can effectively raise issues for discussion and/or further investigation. This pedagogical potential is illustrated by reference to eight short stories, one biography and a collection of first-person narratives.

Supporting Students with Learning Disabilities: Integrating Technology into an I-Search Unit

The goal of this article is to show how technology can be integrated into an I-Search Unit to support students with learning disabilitws in mainstream, middle school classes. The article has three major sections. The first section provides an overview of an I-Search Unit; an inquiry-based interdisciplinary curriculum unit that has four phases. In Phase I, students become immersed in the unit's theme (such as ecology or justice) that is socially relevant and personally motivating to early adolescents. In this phase, they engage in vari£d activities to elicit prior knowledge and to build background knowledge. Students pose personally meaningful I-Search questions to investigate by the end of the phase. In Phase II, students develop a search plan that details how they will gather information by reading books, magazines, newspapers, reference materials; watching videos, filmstrips; intervi£wing people or conducting surveys; or carrying out experiments, doing simulations, or going on field trips. In Phase III, they gather and integrate information. Phase IV involves writing an I-Search Report that has the following sections: My Search Question, My Search Process, What I Learned, What This Means to Me, and References. The second section will show how a rich vari£ty of technology applications can be integrated into an I-Search Unit to help students with disabilities to:

Effects on ESL Reading of Teaching Cultural Content Schemata

Research by Gatbonton and Tucker (1971) showed that due to cultural misunderstandings, EFL students drew incorrect assumptions when reading unfamiliar texts; however, when provided with pertinent cultural information, their performance increased significantly. Similar findings were reported by Yousef (1968). Steffensen, Joag‐dev, and Anderson (1979) demonstrated that implicit cultural knowledge presupposed by a text and the reader's own cultural background knowledge interact to make texts based on one's own culture easier to read and understand than syntactically and rhetorically equivalent texts based on less familiar, more distant cultures. Johnson (1981) demonstrated that the cultural origin of a text has a greater effect on ESL reading comprehension than does linguistic complexity.The related pedagogical question is: “Can we improve students' reading by helping them to build background knowledge on the topic prior to reading?” Available pedagogical research in English as a first language suggests an affirmative answer to this question (Stevens 1982). The present study investigated this question for English as a second language. Using pre‐ and posttests with experimental and control groups of intermediate‐level ESL students, half of each group receiving syntactically more complex versions of the test passages than the other half, the experimental group was taught appropriate cultural background information between pre‐ and posttesting.Results showed that by providing the students with first‐hand experiential knowledge, reading comprehension, as measured by objective tests as well as by a free written recall test, was facilitated. Differences in the syntactic complexity showed no significant effect on ESL reading comprehension.

Effects on Reading Comprehension of Building Background Knowledge

This experimental study investigated the effects on reading comprehension of building background knowledge. The following specific points were addressed. Would prior cultural experience have different effects on ESL students' reading comprehension of information linked to a familiar aspect of an American custom in comparison to information linked to an unknown aspect of this custom? Would time of presentation of the meanings of preselected unfamiliar vocabulary words in the same passage have different effects on reading comprehension? Seventy two advanced ESL students on the university level read a passage on the topic of Halloween. The passage contained unfamiliar and familiar information based on the subjects' recent experience of this custom. Subjects studied the meanings of preselected unfamiliar vocabulary words before reading and/or found them in the text. Statistical analysis of the recall of the passage and of the sentence recognition task indicates that prior cultural experience prepared readers for comprehension of the familiar information about Halloween in the passage. However, exposure to meanings of the target vocabulary words by any of the treatments seems not to have a significant effect on reading comprehension. Characteristics of a text can have a large impact on readers' ability to comprehend it. The cultural background of the topic and the level of vocabulary difficulty of a passage influence reading comprehension. Goodman (1971) has described reading as a cyclical process by which a reader reconstructs a text by sampling, predicting, testing, and confirming. Goodman's argument is that the good reader takes advantage of the redundancy inherent in language which enables a reconstruction of the whole text although only a part of the graphic material has been extracted. Once such an internal reconstruction of the textual message has taken place, the reader tests its accuracy against previous information. Previous information can be the information extracted from a text as well as the reader's background knowledge on the topic of a text. When the reader confirms that the reconstruction is in agreement with previous knowledge, then the cyclical process of sampling begins again. If there is some inconsistency or inaccuracy in the reconstruction of a text because of a conflict with the reader's background knowledge, the reader may reread the text or may not believe the informa