Lit review continued
Anecdotal evidence
Students have difficulty learning curriculum (can't get through the whole thing in one year.
Students have difficulty retaining information (forget prior lessons, making it difficult to build on those lessons to construct new knowledge).
Lit review
Marzano (2005) recommends a number of activities to build background knowledge:
- multimedia
- experiential learning with manipulatives/realia (structured and unstructured)
- cooperative interpretations
- solving puzzles/inquiry
- presentations
The Problem
- Prior knowledge comes from experiences inside and outside the classroom. (Navarro 2007)
- Background knowledge makes accessing content and constructing new knowledge easier (Pulido 2007)
- It doesn't matter if background knowledge is in L1 or English (Collier, 2003).
- only 5/18 students read at grade level
- 11% passing rate on SOL reading
- 30% passing rate on SOL-prep test for math
- Reading and instructional interventions have been unsuccessful with this group for many years.
- increased instructional time has not yielded increase in testing scores.
Q: What can I do to build background knowledge?
Revised Q: What are the effects of schema-building activities?
Findings
Context
- Title I school
- Low-income area (77% on free/reduced lunch)
- Concentrated immigrant population (100% ESL class)
- Individualistic nature of background knowledge
- Outside influences on student learning have a large impact on background knowledge
- The pace of schema and content acquisition
- Experiential learning
Background knowledge