Is your child’s teacher confusing poor reading comprehension with a lack of background knowledge?

With so much focus on decoding and fluency, background knowledge is often overlooked when evaluating students for reading comprehension. This entertaining video by cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham demonstrates just how critical background knowledge is to our comprehension.

“Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry. You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)”

Fortunately there are strategies teachers and parents can follow to help students build background knowledge. But first, according to Willingham, “We have to recognize that reading is an interaction between the words on the page and the knowledge in the reader’s head. Without background knowledge, you can’t comprehend a text to a level we would call “understanding.”