Clearing Up Misconceptions about "Building Knowledge"

Some science-of-reading advocates assume it means rejecting any comprehension strategy instruction

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It’s time to address some misunderstandings that are circulating about what it means to focus on building students’ knowledge.

In a webinar last month, two science-of reading advocates pushed back against what they called “a growing misunderstanding” that knowledge was more important than other factors in language comprehension. They also repeatedly denounced what they termed a “wholesale rejection” of comprehension strategy instruction by proponents of knowledge-building.

One of the two presenters was Maria Murray, the founder and CEO of The Reading League, a prominent organization in the science-of-reading world. The other was an educator and researcher named Leslie Laud.

The evidence for their claims consisted mostly of quotations from various people, including some literacy experts, saying in general terms that they’re seeing an overemphasis on knowledge and that strategy instruction is being “thrown out.” There was only one slide purporting to show that advocates of knowledge-building were actually calling for that.

That slide displayed the titles of two publications. On the right was a brief from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute that appeared in May titled “Think Again: Should Elementary Schools Teach Reading Comprehension?” On the left was the headline of a post I wrote about that brief, along with my byline. My post was titled “A Call for an End to Reading Comprehension Instruction.”

“So this shift that’s happening in our field that’s worrisome could not be clearer in these publications,” Laud says, commenting on the slide. “Literally one is called ‘A Call for an End of [sic] Reading Comprehension Instruction.’” She adds, “That is a call to reject science.”

That makes it sound as though my post itself was calling for an end to reading comprehension instruction. In fact, though, I was using that phrase to describe the Fordham brief—that was the “call.” And in my post I actually criticized the brief for seeming to omit any role for comprehension strategy instruction.

“That could provide fodder for the misconception that teachers need to choose between that kind of instruction and knowledge-building,” I wrote—not realizing at the time that my own post would also be used that way, apparently just because of its title.

Writers generally assume that people will read more than just the title of a piece before criticizing it, but obviously that’s not always the case. So I’ve changed the title of the post to make it clearer that it’s the Fordham brief, not me, that’s issuing the “call.”

But this is about more than one post and one webinar. Many of the criticisms Murray and Laud lodged against a knowledge-building approach are arguments I’ve heard before, and they rest on fundamental misunderstandings of what advocates of knowledge-building, myself included, are actually saying.

So in hopes of clearing up the confusion, I’ll address these misconceptions one by one, as briefly as I can. I’ve said all of this before at greater length—in posts, presentations, and interviews—but apparently it all bears repeating. (See for example, this post titled “No, Teachers Don’t Have to Choose Between Knowledge and Strategies.” Or this one, called “Don’t Stop Teaching Comprehension—Just Embed It in Content.”) While I can’t speak for all advocates of knowledge-building, I’m pretty certain that those I know would agree with my responses.

Misconception #1: Advocates of knowledge-building reject strategy instruction.

Actually, any effective knowledge-building curriculum or approach includes strategy instruction, even if it isn’t labeled as such. The difference is what gets put in the foreground: skills or content.

The standard approach has been to teach an isolated skill or strategy—maybe “comparing and contrasting”—and use a text to teach the skill. A knowledge-building curriculum will put a particular topic or text in the foreground and bring in whatever skills or strategies are appropriate to help kids understand and analyze the content. And an effective curriculum will ensure that students have the knowledge they need to apply the skills.

Here’s an example: I was observing a second-grade class that had been learning about various ancient civilizations in both first and second grade, using a knowledge-building curriculum called Core Knowledge Language Arts. One day the teacher asked the class what was unique about Ancient Greek civilization, which they were currently studying.

After numerous hands went up, she called on one boy, who responded, “Something unique was that they weren’t near a river and they didn’t have any fertile soil, so it was difficult for them to farm.” He wouldn’t have been able to come up with that answer if he hadn’t acquired knowledge of Greek and other ancient civilizations.

No one told the boy, “Oh, you just used the skill of comparing and contrasting!” But kids were constantly doing that—and making inferences, finding the main idea, etc.

Misconception #2: Advocates of knowledge-building focus on knowledge to the exclusion of other elements in the “reading rope.”

A little background for those not familiar with this infographic, created over 20 years ago by reading researcher Hollis Scarborough: It shows two clumps of strands that entwine to make up “skilled reading,” one clump for word recognition and one for language comprehension. The language comprehension clump includes background knowledge (at the top), vocabulary, language structures (like syntax), verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge.

It's true that advocates of knowledge-building talk about knowledge more than the other language comprehension strands, but that’s largely because acquiring knowledge lays much of the necessary foundation for acquiring the other ones.

For instance, teaching vocabulary words in isolation doesn’t work. Students need a meaningful context in order to understand and retain new words. Plus, it’s been found that kids acquire most of the vocabulary they need incidentally, by making inferences about unfamiliar words that appear near ones they already know. For both of those reasons, the most effective way to build vocabulary is through building knowledge.

I do often talk about syntax (or sentence structure) as a significant potential barrier to comprehension, because the syntax of written language is more complex than that of spoken language. But again, it’s been found that for most students, it doesn’t work to teach rules of grammar and syntax in the abstract. Like vocabulary, those things need to be taught in a meaningful context, ideally by explicitly teaching students how to write complex sentences about what they’re learning through a knowledge-building curriculum. So, yeah—knowledge again.

Misconception #3: Advocates of knowledge-building reject the “science of reading.”

As with many terms in education, the “science of reading” can mean different things. Murray and Laud seem to be using it to refer to studies showing that certain kinds of comprehension strategy instruction can boost reading comprehension as measured by standardized tests.

There are indeed many such studies, and no one is denying they exist. But there are significant caveats. Aside from the fact that many of the skills that have been commonly taught in schools don’t have much evidence behind them, the biggest caveat is that a little strategy instruction seems to go a long way.

As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has observed, meta-analyses of these studies show “no evidence that increasing instructional time for comprehension strategies—even by 400 percent!—brought any benefit.” I read one of those meta-analyses, and it found that one hour of strategy instruction yields the same benefit as 55 hours. American schools have been spending many, many hours on isolated strategy instruction—far beyond what the evidence supports.

In addition, the “science of reading” needs to be seen as a subset of cognitive science, or the “science of learning.” There is ample undisputed evidence from the science of learning that having knowledge—whether it’s knowledge related to the topic or just general academic knowledge and vocabulary—is hugely helpful to reading comprehension. So let’s not reject or overlook that science.

Plus, as I said above, any effective knowledge-building curriculum does incorporate comprehension strategies that are appropriate for whatever content is being covered.

Misconception #4: There’s no evidence that building knowledge will raise reading achievement.

This post is getting long, so I won’t go into all the evidence we do have that shows a knowledge-building curriculum can raise reading achievement, but you can read about some of it here, here, and here.

I will say, as I have before, that it’s not surprising there are more studies showing strategy instruction boosts reading achievement than there are showing that knowledge-building does. That’s because the standardized tests used to measure progress in reading comprehension aren’t tied to any specific body of knowledge. To quote Dan Willingham again, they’re really “knowledge tests in disguise”—but they’re tests of general knowledge.

Kids do acquire general knowledge through a knowledge-building curriculum, but it can take years for them to acquire enough of it to show up in increased test scores. And it’s expensive and difficult to conduct studies that last for years—most only last six weeks or so—so there aren’t many of them.

Apparently it’s easier to see results from strategy instruction in just six weeks. It’s possible, in fact, that you really only need an hour or two of instruction to get those results (see the discussion under Misconception #3). But how long do those benefits last? Researchers generally don’t follow up to see if the effects are still there after a year or two, or even more. On the other hand, some evidence shows that the benefits of a knowledge-building curriculum keep increasing the longer kids are exposed to it.

Misconception #5: You can’t rely on building knowledge because it’s impossible to build all the background knowledge students will need as they go through life.

It’s certainly true that you can’t teach kids about every topic they’ll need to know about to be proficient readers in later years. But that’s not the theory behind a knowledge-building approach.

Rather, the theory is that eventually, through learning about a series of topics in a coherent sequence, students will acquire enough general academic knowledge and vocabulary to enable them to read and understand texts on topics they don’t already know about. Studies suggest that does happen, but it can take three or more years.

Misconception #6: A knowledge-building approach means just stuffing kids’ heads full of facts, which won’t enable them to learn independently.

I’ve never seen a knowledge-building curriculum that just has kids memorize facts without asking them to think about and analyze those facts. The habits of analytical thinking that are fostered through a good curriculum—along with facts or concepts covered in the curriculum that are retained in long-term memory—are actually what will enable kids to learn independently throughout their lives.

I suppose there’s an argument that if you just guide students to, say, make an inference without explicitly telling them they’re applying the strategy of “inferencing,” they won’t remember that they should make inferences when they’re reading in the future. But I don’t know of any evidence to support that, and it’s certainly not what teachers who have used knowledge-building curricula have told me. On the contrary, they’ve seen students spontaneously making inferences—and applying other skills and strategies—as they acquire more knowledge.

Misconception #7: The term “knowledge gap” denigrates the knowledge students have acquired from their life experiences and communities.

Murray and Laud mention this point only in passing, alluding to an academic article making the argument. But I’ve encountered it enough times that I think it’s worth addressing.

The idea of a “knowledge gap” does not in itself privilege any particular kind of knowledge. We all have knowledge gaps. When I try to read about popular culture or sports I am often keenly aware of my own knowledge gaps. Of course the knowledge children acquire outside school has value, and it should not be denigrated or disrespected.

As readers may know, I have written a book titled The Knowledge Gap. The particular “gap” I refer to in the title is the one between what the curriculum assumes students know, particularly at higher grade levels, and what many actually do know.

The basic reason for that gap is that the knowledge assumed by the curriculum has been withheld at lower grade levels, often because instructional time that should be spent on subjects like social studies gets devoted instead to hours of decontextualized practice in reading comprehension skills. And yet, students at higher grade levels are held accountable for knowledge that has been denied them. That strikes me as the height of unfairness.

A corollary to this critique is that teachers who absorb the idea of a “knowledge gap” will have lower expectations for their students. But I’ve seen that the opposite is true. Once teachers start building kids’ knowledge, they’re often amazed by what their students can do, and their expectations become higher.

Is there really that much disagreement here?

I’ll just close by noting that by the end of the webinar, it became apparent to me that what Murray and Laud are advocating for doesn’t actually seem all that different from what I and other proponents of knowledge-building are urging.

At first they seemed to be arguing that kids should be taught strategies in the context of unfamiliar topics, outside of any content-area instruction. They demonstrated how they themselves used strategies to parse what initially looked like an incomprehensible paragraph full of medical terminology, which they “pre-taught” themselves by Googling. Then they looked for key words to indicate what kind of structure the text had (for example, problem/solution) and used sentence stems or frames to paraphrase the text and get the main idea.

Yes, of course, you can look up unfamiliar words—and students should know they can do that. But it’s a lot quicker and easier if you already know the terminology. Teachers can also “pre-teach” kids unfamiliar words in an isolated text just before using it for strategy practice, but without repeated exposure to the words in meaningful contexts (i.e., through knowledge-building), those words are unlikely to stick in students’ long-term memory.

And the question isn’t whether students need to learn how to do things like paraphrasing or summarizing. They do. The question is whether it’s better for them to learn those strategies in the context of a knowledge-building curriculum—once they’ve acquired some familiarity with a topic—or to learn them in the context of unfamiliar, random topics.

As I’ve observed elsewhere, there’s evidence to suggest that students learn strategies better when they’re familiar with the topic of a text. That accords with cognitive load theory: if students don’t also have to juggle new content in working memory, they’ll have more capacity to absorb a new skill or strategy.

But later in the webinar, Laud explained that her variety of strategy instruction should be embedded in the content of any content-rich curriculum, taking just five or ten minutes a day. I might not take exactly the same approach, but what she was arguing for basically made sense to me. (I would, however, take issue with her idea of what constitutes a content-rich curriculum—she enthused about Into Reading and Open Court as well as Core Knowledge Language Arts. I and other knowledge proponents I know don’t consider the first two to be content-rich.)

The fact that Murray and Laud are advocating for an approach that knowledge advocates might actually agree with is perhaps the most troubling aspect of their webinar. Disagreement can be healthy, and there are certainly legitimate differences of opinion in the field of education. But why manufacture disagreements where none exist? And why mischaracterize what others are advocating for? It only leads to unnecessary confusion and is unfair to teachers and students.