The Science of Reading Simplified
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Background knowledge is everything a reader already knows about a topic before they begin reading about it. It matters because comprehension isn’t a freestanding skill: a reader understands a passage in proportion to how much they already know about it. The same child can comprehend deeply on a familiar topic and barely at all on an unfamiliar one.
Pre-reading strategies are short moves you make right before students read an unfamiliar text, to surface what they already know and quickly supply what they’re missing. They matter because comprehension is an act of connection: a reader can only link new text to knowledge that’s already there, and when it isn’t, you can hand it over in minutes.
Prior knowledge is the specific slice of what a reader already knows that is relevant to the text in front of them. It matters because comprehension is an act of connection: when the relevant knowledge is there, new information has somewhere to attach, and when it isn’t, comprehension stalls, no matter how strong the reader’s decoding skills are.
Background knowledge is everything a reader already knows about a topic before reading a word about it. It matters because comprehension is not a freestanding skill: a reader understands a passage in direct proportion to how much they already know about what it describes. The same student can comprehend well on a familiar topic and fall apart on an unfamiliar one.
Building background knowledge is the deliberate teaching of content (science, history, the arts) so students develop the web of associations they need to comprehend increasingly complex texts. It matters because comprehension isn’t a free-floating skill. A student understands a passage largely to the degree they already know something about its topic, which means the knowledge you build is the comprehension you get.
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