To improve students’ reading comprehension, help them build their background knowledge.

School districts around the nation have made improving reading a top priority, the North Star that is inspiring their reform efforts, their partnerships with researchers, and their educators’ daily work. If you’re a district leader, you’ve probably invested time, money, and energy in scaling up professional learning based on science of reading research, monitoring children’s progress on foundational word reading skills, and implementing evidence-based curricula across your district. And you may be seeing signs of progress: More kids are cracking the code, learning vocabulary words that appear across subjects, and fluently reading grade-level texts. Yet, despite all these efforts, your 3rd-grade reading comprehension scores aren’t improving. And you’re not alone. Your colleagues in small towns, big cities, and large suburbs across America are also struggling to improve children’s ability to read for understanding. In 2019, only about one-third of U.S. 4th graders were reading proficiently (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019), and the pandemic has only made the situation worse. Indeed, there are alarming signs that gaps in reading comprehension outcomes between lower- and higher-performing children have only grown during the COVID-19 pandemic (Kuhfeld, Soland, & Lewis, 2022).

Across the country, state lawmakers are responding by enacting comprehensive reading policies to improve reading outcomes for all (Schwartz, 2021). North Carolina’s Excellent Public Schools Act of 2021, for example, requires the training of all preK and elementary school teachers in the science of reading, as well as the evaluation — and potential modification — of local literacy curricula and instructional methods. California, in a push to ensure that all students can read by 3rd grade, is considering legislation that would require universal screening for dyslexia (SB–237), provide additional reading specialists and coaches where needed, and fund home visits (California Department of Education, 2022). If there is one thing Republican and Democratic governors seem to agree on, it’s that improving young children’s reading proficiency will increase the odds that all children will succeed in school, be ready for college and a career, and successfully participate in our democracy.

Yet, despite the agreement that something must be done to improve young children’s reading comprehension, even the best minds in our country are struggling to figure out how to actually move the needle on student outcomes. Take, for example, the recent findings from a $120 million initiative funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education) called Reading for Understanding. This ambitious national effort supported six stellar project teams as they designed and tested interventions to improve students’ reading comprehension. In a recent summary of findings from the initiative, David Pearson and his colleagues (2020) concluded that, while elementary-grade students enjoyed gains on outcomes that were closely tied to the intervention activities, these gains did not translate into better performance on standardized reading comprehension tests. In other words, there was no evidence that students were able to apply — or transfer — what they had learned from these interventions to other reading tasks.

However, and as we explain below, we’re optimistic that if schools make it a priority to “teach for transfer,” they can make real headway on improving young children’s reading comprehension. To make our case, we’ll dig a little deeper into the problem we face, offer a potential solution to that problem, and describe a real-world test of our solution.

The problem: Reading comprehension is not a skill like swimming

A problem in the current debate about America’s reading crisis is misguided thinking about the nature of reading comprehension. Since 2000, when the National Reading Panel completed its congressionally mandated review of evidence-based recommendations for reading instruction, educators have been encouraged to teach the “big five” reading skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. The thinking is that if kids can master these skills, then they can apply — or transfer — them across a variety of texts on a variety of topics, whether they’re reading about coral reefs, ancient Egypt, or a passage comparing the lives of Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein. But as Hugh Catts (2020/2021) has wisely noted, reading comprehension is not a skill like swimming. If we teach kids to swim, they can transfer that skill from the local pool to a larger body of water. We can’t assume, however, that teaching young children to master the big five reading skills will prepare them to understand and learn from all of the different sorts of books and articles they will encounter as they move through school — on standardized reading tests and beyond.

Certainly, the ability to decode words, to read text with speed and accuracy, and to recognize the vocabulary being used are all essential skills for comprehending text. But these reading skills aren’t sufficient to ensure comprehension. That’s because successful comprehension also requires background knowledge (Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Kintsch, 2009). To make this point more concrete, read this passage:

Kallis and Rhodes put on 84 but, with the ball turning, Mark Waugh could not hit with impunity and his eight overs cost only 37. The runs still had to be scored at more than seven an over, with McGrath still to return and Warne having two overs left, when Rhodes pulled Reiffel to Beven at deep square leg.

Do you understand what you just read? Certainly, you read the words, and you probably know what most of them mean. You may even have the basic gist of the passage. But how well did you understand it? Were you able to paint a picture in your mind of what’s going on, draw an inference about why “deep square leg” is important, or understand the goal of this sport? Did you learn anything new? If your answer to these questions is “yes,” it’s probably because you already know something about cricket.

This is what makes reading comprehension so hard — to understand what you are reading, you must have some amount of background knowledge about the topic already; and to learn from what you are reading, you must be able to integrate any new understandings with that prior knowledge. This is how knowledge is built over time.

A solution: Building background knowledge through schemas

If a fundamental challenge of reading comprehension is that readers need background knowledge to understand and learn from text, then a fundamental aim of instruction must be to help students build knowledge. This point is not new. There have been — and continue to be — calls to elevate the importance of science and social studies instruction, especially in elementary schools, where the “content areas” are often overlooked in favor of tested subjects (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021; Tyner & Kabourek, 2020). Importantly, however, it is not enough to carve out time for content instruction or even to ensure that content standards are covered. Educators need to consider how topics across their curricula relate to one another. They then need to help students create meaningful connections across those topics and teach students how to tap into relevant knowledge while reading. To do this, educators first need to understand the concept of a schema.

It’s critical to take a step back and consider not just the content standards that you need to cover but also the schemas that underlie — and perhaps unify — some of these standards.

A schema is an intellectual framework for organizing knowledge. You can imagine a schema as being like a tree with branches coming off the trunk and leaves covering the branches. If you were able to understand some of the cricket passage, it’s likely that you have a relevant schema (tree) that helped you make some sense of what you were reading. The trunk, in this case, is foundational knowledge about how team sports work, while the branches represent different team sports — maybe one for football, another for baseball, a third for soccer, and so on. These branches might be more or less full, depending on your knowledge of the particular sports. As you read the passage, consciously or unconsciously, words (leaves) like “ball,” “hit,” “cost,” and “runs . . . to be scored” helped you to activate your “team sports schema” and transfer some of your knowledge of other team sports to this passage about an unfamiliar sport. After reading the passage, you can imagine that a tiny new branch might begin to grow off this particular tree (schema) and that this branch would grow more robust after a few more passages about cricket.

As this example demonstrates, how much your students know about a topic will affect how well they comprehend a passage about that topic. Having an easily accessible, robust schema is what makes transfer possible — just as the team sports schema might have helped you follow at least a little bit of the cricket passage. For young children to become proficient readers, they must not only master the big five reading skills but also develop schemas and learn how to tap into relevant schemas as they read about new topics. This means that we should rethink how reading comprehension is taught in school and what the teacher’s role should be. If schemas are like trees, requiring time and the right conditions to grow, the teacher’s job is to cultivate the conditions that help children grow schemas. Thus, the question becomes, how can we teach for transfer so that children can organize facts, concepts, and related words into usable knowledge?

Testing the solution: Teaching for transfer

To see how teachers might help students develop and access schemas, we recently developed an intervention called a Model of Reading Engagement (MORE). The MORE intervention, which we designed to fit into a school’s content (science/social studies) block, includes thematic lessons that build background knowledge and reading engagement in grades 1-3 for the purpose of promoting and measuring transfer in reading comprehension. Here is how the MORE intervention works using a science example:

1. Develop thematic units that build schemas.

First, we developed thematic lessons meant to introduce students to a handful of schemas to help them read and understand texts on various topics that branch out from them (Kim et al., 2021). Because each schema should be strong — like a tree trunk — it’s important to cover only a small number of topics and to teach each one in depth, to make sure students learn the key concepts that tend to cluster together in texts about those topics.

For example, we created one set of thematic lessons all having to do with the schema “scientific study of the natural world,” featuring texts that tend to use similar words and concepts (such as evidence, theory, habitat, survival, and adapt). The more students encounter these essential words and concepts and have opportunities to use them in discussion and/or writing, the stronger the trunk (i.e., the more they can rely on this schema to help them organize, remember, and apply what they learn about new, but related, topics).

In 1st-grade science lessons, for instance, MORE students study the topic of animal survival, including lessons on Arctic animals such as polar bears — what they look like, how they behave, where they live, how they survive, and how they adapt. Then, in 2nd-grade science lessons, students learn to use this knowledge to help them understand more complex, but related topics, such as how paleontologists study the fossils of dinosaurs and the story of the dinosaurs’ eventual extinction. Students also learn that when they read about the scientific study of any animal, living or extinct, they’ll likely encounter certain key concepts (such as evidence, theory, habitat, survival, adapt) again and again. That is, those concepts belong to a general schema that underlies both the specific topics covered during the MORE lessons (polar bears, dinosaurs) and related, untaught ones (Gick & Holyoak, 1983; Schustack & Anderson, 1979).

2. Help students connect new knowledge to a schema.

Second, we encouraged teachers to connect new knowledge to existing schemas. In a typical MORE classroom, teachers do this by telling students which schema they’re teaching (e.g., how scientists study the natural world) and about the common goals, resources, and constraints that scientists confront as they explore this question.

For example, while reading aloud from an informational text like T. Rex: Hunter or Scavenger (Holtz, 2003), a 2nd-grade teacher will connect the specific topic of how paleontologists study dinosaur mass extinctions to the broader topic of scientific discovery. Paleontologists, they’ll explain, are scientists who study “fossil remains of ancient creatures,” and “all scientists use observations about the world around us to try and answer questions” (Holtz, 2003, p. 16). Next, the teacher will help students reflect on the key related words in the text by leading them in an investigation of the word “paleontologists,” with subsequent discussion of the meaning of derivational morphemes “paleo-,” “-ologist,” and the inflectional morpheme “-s.” The schema (how scientists study the natural world), which has been made explicit for students and made visual through a “concept map” represented on the wall of the classroom, provides a scaffold, helping students organize the topics, concepts, and related vocabulary words (deciding which belong to the trunk and which to a specific branch), so they can transfer them to the reading of other books about other kinds of scientific discoveries.

3. Measure your students’ ability to read informational texts.

Third, we measured students’ ability to transfer learning from the MORE lessons to new topics. To do this, we adapted a taxonomy of transfer developed by Cornell University psychologists Susan Barnett and Stephen Ceci (2002) and developed a yardstick that enabled us to determine how well students could comprehend passages that differed just a little (near-transfer), somewhat (mid-transfer), and a lot (far-transfer) from the content and context of the MORE lessons. Our near-transfer passage was about paleontologists and ammonites (a type of fossil), our mid-transfer passage was about archaeologists and the ruins of Pompeii, and our far-transfer passage was on genealogists and our ancestors. The varying degrees of distance from the initial topic helped us determine whether and how well the MORE lessons enriched students’ knowledge of the schema needed to understand each text. We recently completed a longitudinal, randomized controlled trial involving 30 schools and nearly 3,000 1st and 2nd graders (Kim et al., in press). What did we learn?

After the grade 2 lessons, we found clear evidence that children were able to read about and understand near-transfer and mid-transfer texts on topics like ammonites and Pompei. (We found only small effects on children’s ability to transfer their knowledge to the text on genealogy; we haven’t yet figured out how to teach for far transfer.) Further, we found that both low- and high-performing children enjoyed similar gains on the transfer passages, and we’ve replicated our findings across many studies.

Transferring these lessons to your context

Making gains in reading comprehension scores is challenging. Readers need background knowledge to understand and learn from text, but there is so much content to cover and so little time. We argue that it’s critical to take a step back and consider not just the content standards that you need to cover but also the schemas that underlie — and perhaps unify — some of these standards. We suggest sitting down with a few colleagues and working through the following three steps as a way of taking what you’ve learned from our research and turning it into more usable knowledge for your district or school.

1. Take stock of the knowledge your students are expected to learn. Sit down with your content standards. If you are a 3rd-grade teacher, you might focus on your state’s 3rd-grade science or social studies standards for the year. What topics will students be introduced to? In North Carolina, for example, 3rd graders are expected to learn about “the earth/moon/sun system,” “the structures of the Earth’s surface,” “human body systems,” and “how plants survive in their environments,” among other things.
2. Identify a few unifying schemas. Consider the topics to be covered for the year and then ask yourself, “How can we integrate instruction around a coherent schema?” For example, many of North Carolina’s 3rd-grade science standards lend themselves to the study of the larger schema (tree) “living and nonliving systems.” Instead of teaching about the solar system and then being done with it and moving on to the human body and then being done with it, and so on, consider larger schema (the trees) that connect the topics (branches) you are expected to cover.
3. Design opportunities for students to zoom out and see the trees (schemas) you have identified as well as their branches (topics) that you are studying. Now that you have identified a handful of schemas that unify some of the discrete topics you have to cover, design lessons that will help make these schemas visible to students. Consider building representations of these schemas on your classroom walls. Encourage students to zoom in and out across the year.

We hope that working through these steps with colleagues will inspire your efforts to transfer these ideas into knowledge that works in your school or district.

References

Anderson, R.C. & Pearson, P.D. (1984). A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading. In P.D. Pearson (Ed.), Handbook of reading research (pp. 255-291). Longman.

Barnett, S.M. & Ceci, S.J. (2002). When and where do we apply what we learn? A taxonomy for far transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 612-637.

California Department of Education. (2022, March 10). State Superintendent Tony Thurmond reaffirms commitment to literacy programs to drive learning recovery and announces support of literacy legislation [Press release].

Catts, H. (2021-2022, Winter). Rethinking how to promote reading comprehension. American Educator.

Holtz, T.R. (2003). T. Rex: Hunter or scavenger? Random House Children’s Books.

Kim, J.S., Burkhauser, M.A., Mesite, L.M., Asher, C.A., Relyea, J.E., Fitzgerald, J., & Elmore, J. (2021). Improving reading comprehension, science domain knowledge, and reading engagement through a first-grade content literacy intervention. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113 (1), 3-26.

Kim, J.S., Burkhauser, M.A., Relyea, J.R., Gilbert, J.B., Scherer, E., Fitzgerald, J., Mosher, D. & McIntrye, J. (in press). A longitudinal randomized trial of a sustained content literacy literacy intervention from first to second grade: Transfer effects on students’ reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology.

Kintsch, W. (2009). Learning and constructivism. In S. Tobias & T.M. Duffy (Eds.), Constructivist instruction: Success or failure? (pp. 223-241). Routledge.

Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., & Lewis, K. (2022). Test score patterns across three COVID-19-impacted school years. (EdWorkingPaper: 22-521). Annenberg Institute at Brown University.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021). Call to action for science education: Building opportunity for the future. The National Academies Press.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2019). The nation’s report card: Results from the 2019 mathematics and reading assessments. U.S. Department of Education.

Pearson, P.D., Palincsar, A.S., Biancarosa, G., & Berman, A.I. (Eds.). (2020). Reaping the rewards of the Reading for Understanding Initiative. National Academy of Education.

Schustack, M.W. & Anderson, J.R. (1979). Effects of analogy to prior knowledge on memory for new information. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 18 (5), 565-583.

Schwartz, S. (2021, October 13). More states are making the ‘science of reading’ a policy priority. Education Week.

Tyner, A. & Kabourek, S. (2020, September). Social studies instruction and reading comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

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This article appears in the May 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 8, pp. 20-24.