Teachers' review of knowledge crucial to reading comprehension outcomes

Led by Reid Smith from LaTrobe University, the study involved 73 Year 2 students from a regional Victorian primary school who were explicitly taught a knowledge-base as part of their regular classroom instruction before their text comprehension skills were tested.

Crucially, the effects of a delay between students learning the content and reading a related text were assesed, unearthing some insightful results that could have implications for teachers’ practice.

Namely, while explicitly teaching a knowledge base did enable both skilled and less skilled readers to make more accurate inferences, weaker readers acquired patchier knowledge within the same instructional time.

They also showed a significantly greater drop in comprehension when there was a delay between learning and reading the text.

Researchers say the findings highlight the need for teachers to pay particular attention to the careful revision of knowledge being developed, and that this is particularly critical for students with weaker reading skills.

“It is difficult to determine whether low reading skill affects the ability to learn new knowledge, or whether those who have more difficulty learning new knowledge are poorer readers as a result,” the study states.

It’s concluded that some students may not have had enough repetitions to be able to access the knowledge while they read, and that the schemata resulting from explicit instruction was more complete for skilled readers compared to weaker readers.

What is certain is that reading comprehension depends – at least in part – on the availability of prior knowledge and that children with less knowledge are less able to compensate for weaker reading skills.

“It may also be true that reading skill impacts on knowledge acquisition. It has been noted that, for some students, a greater number of repetitions is required to secure new knowledge in long-term memory,” the researchers state.  

Research spanning 40 years has shown background knowledge makes a ‘substantial contribution’ to children’s reading comprehension abilities.

“We know that the quality and quantity of relevant knowledge that a person can bring to the act of reading is one of the strongest predictors of reading comprehension,” the study emphasises.  

The past decade has seen a clear decline in Australian primary students’ ability to comprehend written text, a trend that the researchers say is alarming given the strong links between literacy and children’s future academic, social, and economic prospects.

Students from low socio-economic backgrounds and Indigenous students are over-represented in the tail of the achievement curve in Australian data.

The worrying trend can also be seen in other English-speaking nations, the researchers flag, such in in the US, Canada and Europe.

“Reading comprehension is not a unitary phenomenon, as it relies on many underlying skills, such as decoding, vocabulary knowledge, inferencing, mastery of figurative language, ability to process different sentence structures, plus background knowledge.

“The absence or weakness of any of these components can reduce students’ capacity to read for meaning,” the study says.

Commenting on the study in a Substack post, Dr Carl Hendrick, Professor of Evidence-Informed Learning and Teaching at Academica University in Amsterdam, said it supports the case for schools to follow a knowledge-rich curriculum design.

“…deliberately teaching domain knowledge does appear to translate into improved comprehension of related texts, including for weaker readers.”

But Hendrick noted a structural problem has been revealed within this approach.

“Less skilled readers, the very students a knowledge-rich curriculum is most intended to help, are less likely to fully acquire the knowledge base within a standard unit of instruction, and more likely to lose access to it if it is not regularly revisited,” he explained.

“The metaphor that comes to mind is scaffolding that is removed too soon: the knowledge built through instruction may simply not be stable enough, in less skilled readers, to bear the weight of inference-making weeks later.”

Thus, the effective implementation of a knowledge-rich curriculum is “not merely a matter of content selection, but requires deliberate, recurring review built into the instructional sequence itself, what the authors call schema maintenance”, the expert concludes.

Tim O’Sullivan, principal at Bradshaw Primary School, shared his thoughts on the study via LinkedIn.

“Okay, I just read this and it was brilliant and I am completely on board with importance of background knowledge on reading comprehension,” he posted.

“Allow me some vulnerability here though as a school leader…”

The school leader said the findings around weaker readers were “really daunting”.

“Couple this with the unconstrained nature of 'background knowledge' as opposed to more constrained skills like phoneme-grapheme correspondence, mathematical algorithms and even different syntactic structures a few questions come up for me.

“The need for matching knowledge base to reading comprehension tasks and the deliberate renewal and revision of knowledge base (particularly beneficial to less skilled readers) suggests really deliberate and quality choices around the selection of knowledge base to be taught.

“An obvious go to place would be the Australian Curriculum but I think most of us would agree that it is not always the most helpful document - it can at times say a lot without saying anything,” O'Sullivan shared.