In the premiere episode of Season 8 of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by guests Reid Smith and Pamela Snow to lay the groundwork for a season entirely centered on knowledge and knowledge-building. Reid and Pamela—of the SOLAR Lab at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia—recently co-authored (along with many others) a review of the literature on background knowledge and literacy. In this discussion, they share what they learned, including some surprising takeaways. This episode examines the complexity of building background knowledge, the important role it plays in literacy, and the reasons we’ve decided to spend a whole season exploring it!
Show notes:
Quotes:
“We decided we'd embark on a knowledge-rich curriculum where we would make deliberate decisions about what it is that we would like our students to know about the world in which we live and thinking carefully about the coherence and sequencing of that knowledge.” —Reid Smith
“This idea of having a coherent curriculum that systematically builds knowledge and skills over time is something that we think is really important for our kids.” —Reid Smith
“There's a group of students who, even when they know they have the background knowledge that's required to make inferences in a text, they find that really difficult, that they have difficulty identifying the pieces of knowledge that they actually have that are going to enable them to make inferences with a particular text.” —Reid Smith
“Explicit teaching is an important way of building accurate background knowledge, building schema about a topic that, of course, is an important social equity lever for us to pull because not all students have equal opportunities.” —Pamela Snow
“Background knowledge has a particularly strong effect for those students who don't have other compensatory mechanisms to be able to pick up the ball when they don't have that background knowledge.” —Reid Smith
“The long-term memory makes no distinction between information that's correct or incorrect…so, of course, the incorrect knowledge would impact on our understanding." —Reid Smith
“I think we respect teacher autonomy when we give them the knowledge that they need about how the English writing system works, right across the Reading Rope, and how the English language works, right across the Reading Rope.” —Pamela Snow
In the premiere episode of Season 8 of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by guests Reid Smith and Pamela Snow to lay the groundwork for a season entirely centered on knowledge and knowledge-building. Reid and Pamela—of the SOLAR Lab at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia—recently co-authored (along with many others) a review of the literature on background knowledge and literacy. In this discussion, they share what they learned, including some surprising takeaways. This episode examines the complexity of building background knowledge, the important role it plays in literacy, and the reasons we’ve decided to spend a whole season exploring it!
Show notes:
Quotes:
“We decided we'd embark on a knowledge-rich curriculum where we would make deliberate decisions about what it is that we would like our students to know about the world in which we live and thinking carefully about the coherence and sequencing of that knowledge.” —Reid Smith
“This idea of having a coherent curriculum that systematically builds knowledge and skills over time is something that we think is really important for our kids.” —Reid Smith
“There's a group of students who, even when they know they have the background knowledge that's required to make inferences in a text, they find that really difficult, that they have difficulty identifying the pieces of knowledge that they actually have that are going to enable them to make inferences with a particular text.” —Reid Smith
“Explicit teaching is an important way of building accurate background knowledge, building schema about a topic that, of course, is an important social equity lever for us to pull because not all students have equal opportunities.” —Pamela Snow
“Background knowledge has a particularly strong effect for those students who don't have other compensatory mechanisms to be able to pick up the ball when they don't have that background knowledge.” —Reid Smith
“The long-term memory makes no distinction between information that's correct or incorrect…so, of course, the incorrect knowledge would impact on our understanding." —Reid Smith
“I think we respect teacher autonomy when we give them the knowledge that they need about how the English writing system works, right across the Reading Rope, and how the English language works, right across the Reading Rope.” —Pamela Snow
Really, that's our legacy to them as the world's knowledge about the things that have happened in the world that we live in, but it's their birthright.
Susan Lambert:This is Susan Lambert and welcome to Season 8 of Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify, where the Science of Reading lives. After seven seasons, and more than 4.5 million downloads, we're thrilled to now share a brand new season all about knowledge. This season, we're going to look at why knowledge is so critical for literacy development, and how it can be developed in students most effectively. Over these next few months, we're going to dive into specific topics like the research on read-alouds.
Molly Ness:Read-alouds really are the way to build language comprehension.
Susan Lambert:We'll delve into best practices for developing vocabulary.
Gina Cervetti:I like to think about vocabulary not as individual words, but as a set of labels for ideas.
Susan Lambert:We're going to kick things off by stepping back, to take a big picture look at the years of research on background knowledge, and its key role in literacy development. My guides through the decades of research on this topic will be two scholars out of the SOLAR Lab at La Trobe University in Australia. One guest joined us way back on Season 2 of the podcast, Dr. Pamela Snow, professor of cognitive psychology and co-creator of the Science of Language and Reading Lab at La Trobe University. The other is Reid Smith, the lead author of a paper we'll be talking a lot about on this episode titled "The Role of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension: A Critical Review." Before we dive in, I'll mention that that paper, as well as another one we'll be discussing titled "Elementary Teachers' Perspectives on Teaching Reading Comprehension," are open access and linked in our show notes. And now, let's kick off Season 8 with Reid Smith and Pamela Snow. Pamela Snow, thank you for joining us again on Science of Reading: The Podcast. It's always a pleasure.
Pamela Snow:Thank you, Susan. It's a delight to be here with you again.
Susan Lambert:We're only gonna get a little bit of time to talk with you, because we're gonna switch over to another guest that we'll introduce in a minute. But, we sure would love it if you could talk to our listeners a little bit about who you are, and the Science of Reading work that you're doing there, in Australia. I don't know if you know it, but your blog is quite popular here in the United States, The Snow Report.
Pamela Snow:Thank you, Susan. Well, there's quite a lot happening here in Australia, I think at the moment, with respect to progressing discussion about the Science of Reading, what we all understand collectively as an evolving body of knowledge. At La Trobe University, in 2020, my colleague, associate professor Tanya Serry, and I established the SOLAR Lab, the Science of Language and Reading Lab, in the School of Education at La Trobe University. We're very fortunate at La Trobe, which is a multi-campus university, by the way. It's got five campuses across Victoria. The largest one's in Melbourne. But then there's four regional campuses. So, we have quite a large footprint. Victoria is a small state, geographically, but it's quite a large state with respect to population. And La Trobe has the biggest geographical footprint. And we have an outstanding leader in our dean, professor Joanna Barbousas, who really wants La Trobe University to be a national leader with respect to the science of learning, not just in the reading space but across the curriculum. And so has been really overhauling the way that we prepare our future teachers to be in the classroom, which means overhauling the way we teach those teachers of course. And, as you know, this is a controversial contested space. So the SOLAR Lab, Science of Language and Reading, we very deliberately position language at the heart of all that. We do, literally and metaphorically, Tanya and I both by background as speech language pathologists, but we also have qualifications between us in applied linguistics and in psychology. We've done a lot of work on updating, refreshing initial teacher education, also with our colleague, Dr. Nathaniel Swain, who will be familiar to many of your listeners, I'm sure. We've established three online short courses, which have now had some 10,000 teachers participate. We've established a language and literacy specialization in the La Trobe Master of Education. And we're about to offer a graduate certificate in language and literacy as well, for teachers who are keen to get some formal credentialing, university-based credentialing without having to go down the master's route. And then, of course, we've got wonderful Ph.D. students like the one that you are about to introduce. And we're involved in a number of quite large research projects as well. So there's no shortage of things happening in the SOLAR Lab.
Susan Lambert:That is amazing. And, in terms of the SOLAR Lab, just to be a little more clear about what you do there, can you just talk about specifically what kind of projects you have going on? Or anything you'd like to add?
Pamela Snow:The SOLAR Lab is a virtual entity. There's no bricks and mortar. As I said, we've got a large number of teaching responsibilities. We're involved in a number of consultancies with various different state departments of education. We've developed professional online teaching resources, professional development resources, for states that are transitioning away from a balanced literacy approach towards what we would all see as a structured, explicit approach to all aspects of literacy teaching, not just phonics. We are about so much more than phonics, as I know you are, too . And recently, we're quite humbled about this, a generous philanthropist has gifted us $2.5 million to seed three new research projects. And they're going to all be taking place in Victoria. They're gonna be concerned with coaching models to support whole schools to change practice and lift their student data. We're also going to be establishing research-based reading clinics. And we're also going to be undertaking what we think is a quite ambitious research project that I won't talk about yet today, but maybe you can have me back another time.
Susan Lambert:We will!
Pamela Snow:We're aiming to understand what actually goes on in classrooms, and how that translates to different outcomes for students.
Susan Lambert:Wow, amazing! Some great work happening there. And all in Australia, on the other side of the world. I don't know if you know this, but Australia is one of our highest listeners base for the Science of Reading podcast.
Pamela Snow:I didn't know that.
Susan Lambert:From here, in the United States, to y'all, in Australia , we feel a real partnership for sure. So, you're here to actually kick off and set up the work that you did in collaboration with one of your doctoral students. And, just a little bit of context, I found this article called "The Role of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension: A critical review." I picked it up, I looked at it, and I'm like, "We need to get this content to our listeners," because it's an amazing review of what we know about background knowledge. Can you talk a little bit about how this came together before we actually go over and talk to Reid about it?
Pamela Snow:Well, this work really is Reid's baby, because it is his Ph.D. doctoral research. Reid, as he will explain, is by background a classroom teacher. And , he might disagree, but, I would also see him as a curriculum expert. And, really, Reid came to us a few years ago now. I can't remember exactly when it was, it was certainly pre-COVID, and said that he was interested in enrolling in Ph.D. research but his focus was on reading comprehension. He wanted to do that deeper dive into factors that contribute to students reading comprehension. I think it's fair to say that there has been a lot of focus, in terms of research and teacher professional learning, on supporting students with decoding word recognition, automaticity, and so forth. As it rightly should be, because that's really been neglected and, I would say, underdone in balanced literacy circles. But Reid said he wanted to really be focusing, one way of looking at this is on the other side of the Simple View of Reading, not just the language comprehension, but also the contribution that's made to reading comprehension by background knowledge, and investigate whether that's something that can be influenced by classroom instruction. Now, Reid, you may want to correct me on that, but that's my recollection of our early conversations all those years ago.
Susan Lambert:And, this article was a collaboration with a dream team over there at La Trobe. Right? Can you name some of the other authors that are on this article?
Pamela Snow:Certainly, yes! So, Reid is co-supervised by me, my colleague, who I just mentioned, associate professor Tanya Serry at La Trobe University, and also associate professor Lorraine Hammond from Edith Cowan University in western Australia.
Susan Lambert:That's really fun to hear about! And thank you for sharing that. I know that, in our pre-call, you really wanted to give this right over to Reid and let this be his conversation. But, as you're listening along, Pam, please jump in if there's other things you wanna add. And Reid is over here shaking his head, listeners. You can't see that, but he is shaking his head.
Pamela Snow:Now , we would call that nodding, not shaking his head.
Susan Lambert:There you go. He's nodding his head. We gotta get it right here.
Pamela Snow:That's obviously a little cultural, lexical difference. Because Australian listeners would think that Reid is saying, "No, Pam, don't jump in."
Susan Lambert:Oh, that's very interesting. That is very good context to help with my meaning and comprehension here. I appreciate that. Well, Reid, we're going to jump over to you. So, welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast. I'm so excited to have you on. Thank you for joining us.
Reid Smith:Thank you very much, Susan. I'm really excited to be joining you and the listeners today. Thank you.
Susan Lambert:And we would love, if you would again, just tell us a little bit, you're a classroom teacher? Still a classroom teacher? What do you teach? And, also, I wanna know a little bit about what sparked your interest to pursue an advanced degree? And what sparked your interest into wanting to dig into background knowledge.
Reid Smith:Gee, some small questions there, Susan . I'm a classroom teacher. I started life as, what we would say, a secondary teacher teaching mathematics and science to older children, 16-, 17-, 18-year olds. And then, migrated my way to the heart of school over time. As I became more and more interested in early reading, probably influenced by the fact that my children we're getting close to being school-aged. And, all of a sudden, interests and attention is very much focused on those early years of schooling. But, also, in my role at school, I'm responsible for curriculum from our three-year-old learners through to the nearly school leavers who are 18 years of age. So, that idea of a knowledge-rich and coherent curriculum that runs from the very early years of schooling through to the end of our responsibility really for the kids in their education, that was something that I had a hand in and had responsibility for. So, certainly some of this interest in background knowledge and its influence on reading comes from some of that work in school. And, I'm currently part of a not-for-profit organization that works with teachers to develop curriculum materials that they make freely available to other teachers. A range of different things alongside this fantastic study that I've been so fortunate enough to undertake alongside Pam, Tanya , and Lorraine. It's a pretty exciting time, really. I feel very fortunate.
Susan Lambert:That's really exciting! And very fortunate to have you be able to talk a little bit about what you're learning about background knowledge, because it's sort of kicking off our season. So, we really wanted to focus, as Pam said, on the other side of the Simple View of Reading. All about this idea of language comprehension, but even bigger. The idea of background knowledge. I'm gonna ask you two things. First of all, can you talk a little bit about what you mean by background knowledge? I'll just let you do that before I ask the second question.
Reid Smith:By background knowledge, we consider knowledge about the world that we live in. In particular, when we're specifically talking about background knowledge for reading, it's the knowledge that's assumed by an author when they construct a text. It's part of their communication. Whenever an author is putting together a written piece of work, they make assumptions about things that the reader will know, because you can't describe everything. You can't be explicit about absolutely everything in a novel or some nonfiction work . The background knowledge is that knowledge that a reader brings to the act of reading. And that's knowledge that's either assumed by the writer in the act of writing, but that it also can be knowledge and experiences, and other texts that a reader might have read, that they can overlay with their current reading to make meaning of the text that they're reading at the moment. It's a pretty broad brush stroke. Things that are contained in the long-term memory that are activated when somebody decides to read a piece of connected discourse would be sort of a broad brush definition of that knowledge .
Susan Lambert:And, a little more specifically, you talk about domain knowledge being a subset of that background knowledge. What do you mean by domain knowledge? And how does that actually help in terms of reading?
Reid Smith:Domain knowledge tends, it's a set of connected knowledge around a particular, defined topic or area of knowledge. They are a piece of information and connections between pieces of information and knowledge that together form an understanding about a particular concept. Which can sometimes be very, very narrow, like the concept of background knowledge in reading. Or it can be a little bit wider, such as an understanding of ancient Rome. And, perhaps, some of the ways that the culture existed during that time. It can vary, in terms of size, but it's specific to a particular concept. And we can draw a line around it, if you like to say, "This is a particular set of knowledge about a particular thing." A domain. That's what we mean by domain knowledge.
Susan Lambert:Thanks for that. That was a little selfish on my part. But, I think it's really important that educators hear about the differences of that, because all knowledge isn't created equal. And I think we'll talk a little bit about that. But thanks for going down that little left-hand turn there with me. So, you did an exploration in this critical review. How did you set this thing up? And what did you actually find?
Reid Smith:That's a good question. My interest in the project really was sparked by our curriculum work. And our early reading practices in the school at which I worked. We felt that we had the single-word reading relatively under control. And we were having our students coming up into upper primary for us, elementary school in the United States, where we didn't necessarily feel that we had as much agency over the development of students reading comprehension skills during that time. Despite our best intentions, and a lot of hard work by our teachers. And so, we decided we'd embark on a knowledge-rich curriculum. Where we would make deliberate decisions about what it is that we would like our students to know about the world in which we live, and thinking carefully about the coherence and sequencing of that knowledge. And part of the reason for the development of the knowledge-rich curriculum in that case was to build up this domain knowledge. So that our students would know more, and we as teachers could be sure that our students knew a lot about the topics that they may be reading about. Instead of trying to find out what kids knew about a particular topic when they were reading, we could actually be reasonably assured of this gradual building of knowledge over time. I came to this project simply because, theoretically, that made sense. But, I wanted to make sure, from a practical point: Is this going to result in our students being able to read more effectively? Is it going to build their reading comprehension skills ? If we teach some knowledge in the classroom, will that flow through to the reading of connected text? Of related text? The first port of call for us, as part of this study, was to start doing a search through the literature about background knowledge and it's influence on reading comprehension for students in upper primary, elementary school students. Just to see to what degree does background knowledge have an influence, and how does it influence the reading comprehension of our students. It was an interesting find, because, unsurprisingly, I started off with some hypotheses, Susan, and it took maybe about a week and a half to have some of those hypotheses shattered. And then, just gradually building a bit more of an understanding about background knowledge and its contribution beyond the generally accepted. It has a pretty large influence on reading comprehension of related text.
Susan Lambert:We're gonna get there in a minute. But, that breaks your heart, doesn't it? When your hypotheses are wrong. Or they're,...oh, well, that's the scientific inquiry process! So that's a great thing, right? So, I wanna go back, and I want you to define a couple words. Actually, I just think one. You've used this word "coherent" or "coherency" a couple of times. Can you talk about what coherent means when we're thinking through a knowledge-rich curriculum? What does coherency mean to you and how you were approaching it?
Reid Smith:I guess, probably, the place to start for me would be to consider what a lack of coherence looks like, which is often the case in Australian primary schools. And what a lack of coherence looks like is an ill-defined curriculum. Where decision-making about what is taught and how it's taught lies with individual teachers without much communication between teachers at a particular year level of teaching or over time. You have a fragmented experience for students. What you learn is entirely dependent on whose classroom you happen to be in at a particular time. And then this compounds from year to year. There's a lack of a systematic idea of what a curriculum is within a school. It's a fragmented experience for students. So, a coherent curriculum is one where the learning sequence for students has been carefully thought about from an institution point of view. That's as a school to say, "Well, what is it that we want our students to know and be able to do as a result of their learning in their first year at school?" And then how we build upon that knowledge and skill in the second year of school. So, what is it that we want them to know and be able to do? And being quite specific and deliberate about that building of knowledge. So, if I'm a teacher who's in year three in a coherent school, or a school with a coherent curriculum, I know that my students come to the classroom with this fund of knowledge that's been developed as part of their school-based experiences that I can continue to build on. I can refer back to knowledge and ideas that I know my students have had exposure to, the opportunity to learn about in the past. And that the things that I'm teaching now are going to feed forward into their learning in the future. That it's not, as a teacher, I'm a link in this learning chain for all of these kids in the school. And that's coherence. Over time, that's coherent from one year to the next. But, also, if we look horizontally, that my colleagues who are teaching children of the same age, we're teaching very similar things. We can sit down and have a great chat in the staff room about the things that we're teaching, the things that we're having success with, problem-solve together, because we're all teaching the same thing. And you'd think that Australia having a national curriculum would naturally have that. Right? But the fact is, is that the Australian curriculum isn't particularly specific. It's different to curricula that exists in other nations and in another systems . You find that there's a lot of flexibility there, which can be a great strength, but it can also be a great weakness for schools . This idea of having a coherent curriculum that systematically builds knowledge and skills over time is something that we think is really important for our kids. And it's something that, in Australia, is a thing that schools and teachers are trying to build their capacity in being able to produce for their students.
Susan Lambert:That's really interesting, because we often talk about how important that is when we're thinking about the word recognition side of the Simple View of Reading. And this scope and sequence that's laid out, so that I know as a first-grade teacher the skills that my students were taught in kindergarten. And if they didn't learn them, it's going to be an intervention moment for me. But when we think about the language comprehension side, we don't often think about that coherency. Or about that build from year to year to year. And so, I love how you described that. It was beautiful. Alright, let's go back to this review that you did and some of the hypotheses you thought that you were gonna find and you didn't. What did you end up finding? And what surprised you a little bit in your findings?
Reid Smith:Well, I came into the project thinking that once kids were capable decoders, that it was all about background knowledge. That that was the end game there. And I was surprised, maybe happily, that that wasn't the entire case. That, although background knowledge has a strong influence on reading comprehension, it wasn't everything. It wasn't just a case of students having knowledge that's related to the text that they're reading. There are other factors that are combined or that have an influence. Probably the most surprising things for me were the differential effects of background knowledge for readers of different general reading ability. We found that background knowledge is particularly useful for those students who, as a generalization, might have poorer or below-average reading ability if you looked at their general reading ability, that having background knowledge about a topic was particularly useful for those students, and could partially compensate for poorer reading skills or slower reading skills. For me, that was a little bit surprising that it wasn't an even distribution of effect. That for higher ability readers, they could actually compensate for lower background knowledge through their other strategies and their reading skills. So there was this effect where general reading skill or background knowledge could partially compensate for one another, depending on which one was stronger. Which I hadn't necessarily thought as carefully about until we had a look at that information. And probably one of the most surprising things was that I'd gone into this particular project thinking about Recht and Leslie's baseball study, which is referred to a lot in the literature. And probably as I thought that the effects seen in that particular study were representative of the general literature around reading comprehension. But, as part of this study, we found that it's actually not. It's probably an outlier in terms of the degree to which background knowledge helped compensate for readers who had lower reading ability. The effects, if we looked more broadly than just that particular study, that the effects of background knowledge probably isn't as pronounced. That idea that background knowledge could completely compensate for poorer reading skill is not something that's represented in other studies that have been done. That for me was a little bit surprising, because the baseball study is one of the cornerstones for a lot of the literature and discourse around this particular area. So for me that was something that was quite interesting, and a little bit surprising, I've gotta admit. And the other parts that I found challenging or interesting was that background knowledge has both a positive effect on reading, but also misconceptions that sit in long-term memory , if you like , negative background knowledge also has an influence , but a negative influence on reading comprehension. That if you come to text with particular ideas, concepts, and knowledge that's actually wrong, incorrect pieces of knowledge, that it can actually impede comprehension. And that for our readers who have less skill at the moment, they're actually more impacted by this. They're less able to notice that there's comprehension breakdowns, or that there are differences between what the text is inferring or saying and then their understanding of a particular topic. When they aren't able to see the contradictions as easily as stronger readers. So, for poorer readers, the background knowledge they hold can both be a great benefit to them when they're reading a text, because it helps 'em build comprehension to a greater degree, but it can also be a negative thing, because for students or children, or any reader who holds this information, this background knowledge that's incorrect, or in their long-term memory when they're reading a text, they're much more heavily impacted than, say, higher ability readers or stronger readers. I hadn't realized that flip side. The other side of the coin there of background knowledge and how it can, for some readers, if it's built incorrectly, is actually a negative thing.
Susan Lambert:That's really interesting. We don't often talk about the background knowledge that's incorrect, and how does that get corrected. You have some pretty big things there, right? Three pretty big surprises that you came into this with. Let's take a little step back. First of all, you said it was a pleasant surprise that it wasn't just a shift from, I think you said it was a pleasant surprise to find that, it wasn't just word recognition and then you shift and you're into language comprehension or background knowledge and that's what sort of carries you through. Did I get that right first of all? And second of all, why was that a pleasant surprise?
Reid Smith:Well, I'm not sure if it was a pleasant surprise, but there'd been a, as well as the literature that exists around the role that background knowledge plays, there's also significant literature that exists around the use of comprehension strategies, the strategic actions that students can take to help with their comprehension. Being able to summarize a text, and using graphic organizers to support their comprehension. There was a significant knowledge base. And, one of the things I was grappling with is, necessarily, how these two things could be true, the idea that background, it's all about background knowledge. Once we have that word-level decoding under control, but also these strategies consistently seem to support comprehension. I guess the satisfaction comes from, intellectually, the pieces of the puzzle falling together to say, "OK, well it helped me resolve a contradiction in terms of my understanding before I started the study." Those other pieces, you know , aspects like those comprehension strategies, I think that in Australia, and certainly in the school that I work in, we spent far too long teaching those strategies and we'd rehash the strategies for hundreds of hours every year in small groups. We'd use guided reading pretty extensively. Fountas and Pinnell probably I would say, overcooking to a significant degree there, when in actual fact the comprehension strategies, I think Elleman has done some meta-analysis around these, where she says that actually you need maybe around about 20 hours of instruction and then a little bit of maintenance work after that. It's a small slice. But just having that idea that actually there are these strategies that students undertake when they see that their comprehension is breaking down, that's gonna improve comprehension, was a good thing for me. But also, I think it was interesting to see that for, there's a group of students who, even when they know they have the background knowledge that's required to make inferences in a text, they find that really difficult. That they have difficulty identifying the pieces of knowledge that they actually have that are going to enable 'em to make inferences with a particular text. They have difficulty pruning away the piece of information that isn't useful or is impeding comprehension. So there's a group of students who have some reading challenges, which means that even when we teach them all of the background knowledge, and that background knowledge is really secure, they still are going to have some difficulties reading the text or require additional support. So that helped me, also, solidify or put into context some of the observations I made just working with individual students as part of our Tier 3 reading support programs. Just some of the actions and behaviors that you could see from kids, even when we knew that they had the background knowledge that was required for inferencing, we could see that they were still having difficulties there. It helped connect some of these observations and ideas and research together, which was really useful for me. And I know that for some other teachers, it's been a really useful thing, too .
Susan Lambert:Yeah, we've had a lot of conversations here in the United States about, is it background knowledge or is it comprehension strategies? And the idea is yes, it's both. Right? It's comprehension strategies in service of helping acquire more knowledge. I do think it's also been useful for me to think about, "Well, you can't employ a comprehension strategy without having some rich content." Right? So almost putting the content first, and using the strategies to sort of support that. That's great. And then, OK. So please, Pam is raising her hand. Please, jump in.
Pamela Snow:It's been fabulous actually for me to sit here and listen to Reid talking about this, because it's really helpful, I think, to revisit these concepts and to hear how, over time, our thinking evolves. And, for me, I've been thinking about the implications for cognitive load of what Reid has been talking about. And, also, the implications for explicit teaching, because of the problems with potentially incorrect or incomplete background knowledge. We need to loop back then to what's happening pedagogically and think about the importance of, as Reid said, good curriculum. A really solid, not just a blueprint, but a really detailed understanding of what's going to be taught. So that at the end of the year, we can say "These are the things that the students should know, they should have learned ." Not just that we've taught them, but we're gonna be confident that they've learnt them. So explicit teaching is an important way of building accurate background knowledge. Building schema about a topic. That, of course, is an important social equity lever for us to pull, because not all students have equal opportunities to visit museums, galleries, science centers, the number of books that they're exposed to at home, or all of those things that we know create unevenness. Even within one classroom, let alone between schools. But, I've also been thinking about the implications here. The positive feedback loop, I guess, between being a strong reader with respect to the ability to get the words off the page, being able to use evolving language, knowledge of language structures, like we see in the top half of the Scarborough Reading Rope, in order to access that writer's meaning. And, as Reid said, writers don't footnote everything that they mean. They don't explain every implication. If they're writing an article about geopolitics and they refer to Beijing, they're not going to necessarily say, "Oh, by the way, that's the capital of China. And there are tensions between China and the US and other western nations." That's a shorthand reference. So, for me, I think this is very much about continuing to develop that upper half of the Reading Rope. And the fact that so much of what is written is written indirectly using idiomatic figurative language, that often has some kind of cultural roots to it as well, but that wraps around in a kind of spiral fashion, it wraps around the background knowledge. It's really impossible to separate those out and we shouldn't be trying to separate them out. Which, of course, comes back to the role for strategy teaching.
Susan Lambert:That's a great point. Thanks for jumping in, Pam. Let's shift, Reid, to the influence background knowledge has differently on good readers versus poor readers. Can you unpack that just a little bit?
Reid Smith:Just as a general statement, Susan, that for less confident or less able readers generally, that the background knowledge can support their comprehension really well. And, mainly, that's because they don't necessarily have the reading skill to be able to make some of the inferences in the absence of background knowledge. You actually see a really great compensation effect for those students who find reading much more difficult from a general sense. That's what you see in the baseball study, where you have these readers and they come out and they're able to recall elements from the baseball text at a similar level to those students who are quite able readers, strong readers. And, as I said before, that doesn't necessarily play out everywhere, but you do find that, for the background knowledge, has a particularly strong effect for those students who don't have other compensatory mechanisms to be able to pick up the ball when they don't have that background knowledge. That was a really interesting thing for me is just that importance of background knowledge for kids who don't necessarily have these other strategies and ease of inference that some of the other students might have.
Susan Lambert:That's really interesting. So again, going back to, and I'm just gonna mention this, because it's just not that background knowledge is the silver bullet, because it's quite a nuanced, I can't find the right word right now, but an interplay, a nuanced interplay between a lot of other factors that are going on. And Pam brought up this great reminder of Scarborough's Reading Rope, which actually shows it's more than just background knowledge and word recognition. It's some other things all working together. And that wasn't the most articulate I'd ever been, but I think that image of the nuance of this idea of background knowledge. Alright . So then you talked about one other thing that surprised you in terms of your review. And do you wanna talk a little bit more about that one?
Reid Smith:Yeah, I certainly can. It's that the role of misconceptions, it makes sense, right? When I stand back and actually think about it, of course it makes sense. The long-term memory makes no distinction between information that's correct or incorrect. It's just information and knowledge. And it gets recalled in the same way and integrated with the text in exactly the same way. So, of course the incorrect knowledge would impact on our understanding. And that makes sense to me now that I've considered it. And again, that impacts the readers who are, who are less confident and less able readers more than the stronger readers, because they're less able to identify inconsistencies in the text. And there's a strong evidence, and a strong literature base, that that tells us that one of the differences between poor readers and strong readers is their ability to notice when there are inconsistencies in the text and have strategies that they can employ to resolve those inconsistencies. One of the interesting things, one of the things I really enjoyed, was this idea that if you have a reader, and they're reading a text, and they're a poor reader, and they have some piece of information in their long-term memory that contradicts something that's in the text, often not only will they not notice that there's contradictory information there, but they will actually replace the contradictory element in the text with what they've got in their long-term memory. So if you ask them to recall elements from the text, they'll actually recall it and include the thing that sits in their long-term memory as if they've just read it. So if you had an understanding that sharks didn't eat meat and they liked cauliflower, and then you read in a text that they're these meat-eating predators, then if you are a less able reader, there's certainly a chance that if you were to recall what you'd learned from that particular text, you would then recall that sharks really enjoy eating cauliflower and that they weren't necessarily meat eaters . There's this idea that, as we're constructing meaning of the text, sometimes we can ignore the text completely and replace it with information that sits in the long-term memory. Sometimes, when that information is correct, maybe that's a good thing, but if the information from the long-term memory is actually incorrect, that results in a faulty view and a poorer comprehension of the text that we've just read .
Susan Lambert:That reminds me of when I was a teacher, we did a lot of conversation about misconceptions, particularly in science. So there's been a lot of work in science about identifying misconceptions, particularly in young learners. It's the same thing I think that you're talking about, is that the background knowledge that's stored in our long-term memory is wrong. We call it misconception, wrong, whatever. It also speaks to what Pam said about the importance of explicit instruction in that feedback loop, right? If kids are misunderstanding something, we gotta correct that or they're gonna continue to misunderstand it. It's just, it blows my mind a little bit to think about this idea that what's in my long-term memory is a misconception, I will bring that forward and replace what's in the text with what's in my long-term memory. And that's a little frightening to think about actually, particularly for me, maybe as a reader. But that's an important topic for sure. We've done a lot of talking about background knowledge. But I wanna talk a little bit about, this critical review also led you to do another study, which was actually a survey out to teachers. Can you briefly just give us, how did one thing lead to another? And then what did you learn, or what are you learning, from that survey?
Reid Smith:We are really interested in finding out what Australian primary school teachers believed about reading comprehension, and what their instruction looked like. We were interested in saying, "Well, based on this information that we've just picked up from this critical review, how would that impact current teacher instruction? What does teachings, beliefs, and instructions look like now? And how does that differ from what we've just learned from this critical review?" And so, we decided to find out a little bit more about it. We surveyed a range of teachers from all over Australia who were teaching our upper primary, elementary-school-aged children and asked them about some of their beliefs about how reading comprehension develops once they're reasonable decoders, also some of their practices. What does their classroom look like? What do they do in a literacy block lesson for kids of that age? Also, we wanted to know a little bit more about where they got their information from. Do they use commercial programs for some of their reading comprehension and reading work? Do they gain their knowledge from their initial teacher education? Have they picked it up from their literacy coaches that are in schools or other places? We wanted to know what do they believe and what do they do in classrooms, but also where do these beliefs and practices come from? What are the inputs? And it was really fascinating to see that there's no stereotypical Australian primary school teacher in terms of what they believe and their practices, that there's no real commonality in practice and beliefs. That you almost have this bimodal distribution of teachers, where some have what we might call a student-centered belief, which is where all of the instruction is catering for what we think a student needs at a particular time. And we've got different plans for different students in the class, and everything's driven by their choices around text, and our observations of what they might need next. And then you've got a group of teachers whose beliefs and practices are more content-centered, which is about, these are the things that we want students to know and be able to do as a result of our instruction, and so our planning sits in that spot. We're making probably more decisions as a teacher in that place about what it is that students might need to do next rather than at this other end of the scale. And so we have the beliefs that are very different. And then the practices that stem from those beliefs are very different. Those beliefs affect things like your text choices, what it is that students read, how students engage with text, the role of the teacher in that engagement. It affects what your assessment looks like, because you are valuing different things. So, when we asked about, "How do you know if students are making progress in their reading?," we had very different results that people talked about different things. Some said, "Well, the main factor, the main thing I'm looking for is that they're reading more texts in class," and then that's their view of improved reading comprehension. Or that other people talked about, "Well, they can comprehend more complex texts, or they have a greater range of background knowledge," this range of practices, and what was also interesting, and it stems from where some teachers gain their knowledge, is sometimes people will self-report practices that not only are not coherent but that don't work as part of a strong pedagogical framework for how reading might develop and be taught. But rather, you've got these practices that actually negatively impact each other. They actually, instead of reinforcing, there's actually a negative effect, because you're teaching multiple strategies for exactly the same concept. You're asking students to do different things to achieve the same outcome, and sometimes they're at odds with one another. So you've got this bricolage of instructional techniques that our teachers are using at times and then wondering why it is that perhaps that kids aren't making the progress that they were hoping for in their reading comprehension. That was just really fascinating for us to get an insight into this wide range of beliefs and practices.
Susan Lambert:And Pam, I'm gonna ask you to respond to that. Given the work of the SOLAR Lab, when you looked at some of that survey results, anything surprise you, jump out at you? Anything make you think?
Pamela Snow:I don't think it really surprised us when we looked at the results, and really the results resonated with what Tanya and I hear time and time again from teachers who engage with our SOLAR Lab online short courses, and that's that they have been using this bricolage, and that word, bricolage, is interesting, because that was actually used by an education academic who is an advocate of balanced literacy in a positive way. To say that that's a good thing about balanced literacy, that it is an instructional bricolage , a kind of tapestry almost of some of this and some of that, which of course flies in the face of everything that aligns with the evolving body of knowledge that we call the Science of Reading, which says that it's optimal to teach with a scope and sequence. To be teaching explicitly. To be providing rehearsal and retrieval practice. All of the principles that align with cognitive load and so forth. I think we respect teacher autonomy when we give them the knowledge that they need about how the English writing system works right across the Reading Rope, and how the English language works right across the Reading Rope. So that when we go into schools, the person who has the highest level of expertise about everything to do with reading is a classroom teacher.
Susan Lambert:It's, again, not an either/or. You have to have teachers with great knowledge about how to teach reading and how reading develops along with materials and curriculum that are supporting that so that you have both, right?
Pamela Snow:Exactly. And my position on this is that we should be making this as easy as possible for teachers in the same way that systems try to make things as easy as possible for professionals in other disciplines. We don't say to surgeons, "Well, you know, go and find your own implements on the morning that you've got a theater list. You'll be more autonomous if you get your tray set up for yourself." We have a system whereby surgeons know that, for this particular list, all of the implements that they need are going to be there for them. So, I think we need to have a mature conversation about what professional support looks like, so that teachers can then be exercising autonomy for the children in front of them , but coming from a very high, strong base of knowledge to start off with.
Susan Lambert:That's a great point. Reid, I know you have more research in the works. And we're going to hold that for a discussion another time , so that we can get you back to talk a little bit about what you're finding in this next research study. But, I'm wondering if you have any final words of wisdom that you wanna leave for educators based on what you've learned about either background knowledge or the systems teachers try to employ to be able to get there. Any words of wisdom for our educators?
Reid Smith:I don't know about words of wisdom, Susan. I'd probably just emphasize the importance of thinking carefully about the background knowledge that you're developing in your students and not to neglect the social sciences and science subjects. Sometimes, they can get cut a little bit in the pursuit of reading and mathematics. And, I think that I'd just point to making sure that you really give students the opportunity to learn more about the world that they're in and the cultures that we have in the past, present, and future. They're all really important things for our kids. And, you know, from an instrumentalist point of view, because it helps their reading comprehension, but from a more general point of view, because, really, that's our legacy to them as the world's knowledge about the things that have happened and the world that we live in. It's their birthright, right? It's an important thing. And probably the other aspect would just be the importance of monitoring students' understanding as they read . Given our discussions today about the misconceptions that they might hold that exist both in the knowledge that they bring to the act of reading, but also during the act of reading itself. And you can see that with, if you're reading a fiction book and students have mixed up two of the characters, because they have similar names that start with the same letter, and all of a sudden the text makes no sense at all. So just that importance of just monitoring the comprehension of kids and what they think the text is saying at any particular point. That's something that's really valuable and worth your time. So, that'd be my couple of key points from our discussion today.
Susan Lambert:That's awesome! And Pam, as we close , how amazing is it for you to have a student like Reid, who's really diving deeply and thoughtfully into this topic?
Pamela Snow:We are so fortunate, Susan, in the SOLAR Lab, to have Reid as part of our team and to be producing such high quality outputs from his Ph.D. research along the way. So it's a real privilege for Tanya and Lorraine and I to be part of this team.
Susan Lambert:Well, Reid, no pressure or anything, but we're expecting more great things from you. And we can't wait to have you back on. But, to both you and to Pam, thank you again for joining us. I know our listeners are going to be thrilled with this information and, as always, we will link them in the show notes to all of the great resources. So thank you again for joining us.
Pamela Snow:Thank you, Susan. And Reid , I'll see you very soon for a Ph.D. supervision meeting.
Reid Smith:Thanks, Susan.
Susan Lambert:Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Reid Smith and Dr. Pamela Snow. They're both out of the Science of Language and Reading Lab in the School of Education at La Trobe University in Australia. Check out the show notes for links to some of the resources we discussed, including the papers "The Role of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension: A critical review" and "Elementary Teachers' Perspectives on Teaching Reading Comprehension." A reminder that both are open access so you can breeze right on through to go deeper into these topics. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. For more information on how Amplify leverages the Science of Reading, go to amplify.com/ckla. As this eighth season gets underway, we want to hear from you. What do you wanna know about when it comes to knowledge and knowledge building? Let us know in our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading: The Community. Also, we would love to hear from students about their favorite classroom topics. If you know a young person who might want to hear their voice on this podcast, go to amplify.com/student-testimonials. That's amplify.com/student-testimonials. Next time, we're going deep into the subject of read-alouds with Dr. Molly Ness, author of the recent book "Read-Alouds for All Learners: A comprehensive plan for every subject, every day, grades pre-K–8."
Molly Ness:Just as they're so effective, when we think about sort of the typical early childhood experience of a read-aloud, a teacher in a rocking chair, those benefits continue in upper elementary school as well as middle school.
Susan Lambert:Make sure to catch that and the rest of Season 8 by subscribing to Science of Reading: The Podcast on any podcast platform. Thank you again for listening.