When it comes to learning, prior knowledge affects how new information is absorbed. If a teacher fails to recognize that a student is missing background information, that child is likely to tune out (not unlike that time my husband attempted to teach me the inner workings of a telephone).

“Prior knowledge affects how a student organizes new information,” reports Marilla Svinicki in her article, What They Don’t Know Can Hurt Them: The Role of Prior Knowledge in Learning. “Remember that a goal of learning is to incorporate new information into the existing organization of memory.”

Svinicki, Professor Department of Educational Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, explains, “Instructors can use this prior knowledge of structure to their advantage when they use analogies…. For example, in trying to explain how a gland works, an instructor might say that the gland is like a thermostat.” Since most students know a thermostat monitors heat, they can easily transfer the meaning. On the other hand, if you try to describe buoyant force with the example of a hot air balloon, the lesson will lose it’s meaning unless the student first knows how burners inside the balloon work.

In his paper, Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience, Jeremy Roschelle, Director of the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International, writes, “Educators often focus on the ideas that they want their audience to have. But research has shown that a learner’s prior knowledge often confounds an educator’s best efforts to deliver ideas accurately. A large body of findings shows that learning proceeds primarily from prior knowledge, and only secondarily from the presented materials.”

Parents and teachers may also want to take prior knowledge into account when evaluating a child’s reading comprehension.