Building Background Knowledge

    Buehl’s chapter emphasizes that building disciplinary literacy and inquiry skills is not just about understanding a text’s content, but also about helping students become thinkers within that discipline. By modeling and scaffolding inquiry, providing necessary background knowledge, and encouraging engagement with text features, teachers can help out students in navigating and critically engaging with the complex materials they run into in various subjects. From what I interpreted, the end goal here is to prepare students to think like disciplinary experts and critics, depending on the disciplinary context.

    The question I want to ask everyone is; why do you feel building background knowledge so essential for students when reading disciplinary texts? What ways can teachers effectively prepare students to engage with complex, discipline specific content? Feel free to share any strategies you’ve utilized or plan to implement in your teaching spaces!


Comments

  1. Wilson Caraballo IIIDecember 8, 2024 at 10:08 AM

    As a history teacher background knowledge is essential for the discipline. Without the context for historical events you can't really think about it critically, or do any real disciplinary thinking. One thing I started to do this year was model reading with my students. Showing them what I mean when I ask them to read and annotate every night. I haven't been all that consistent with it, but I think it has been helpful. I do implement it more on an individual level with students. If someone doesn't understand a part of the reading I read it out loud with them and break the reading down like I would. I ask them questions while I go through it with them to get them to think about the text like a disciplinary expert.

    The one other thing that I do is when I tell them the homework I scaffold the reading for them. I explain an overview of what it touches on and how it connects to our larger unit question and where it fits in with what we have already gone over. How effective is it? I really can't tell. However, I do believe it is helpful to as least a handful of kids.

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  2. MarlenDecember 9, 2024 at 12:03 PM

    Building background knowledge is critical for students when reading disciplinary texts so that they can make sense of what they are learning. Ideally, students are invested and engaged with disciplinary texts by analyzing the material and are thinking like an expert. Larger volumes of text can be intimidating but with scaffolding, verbalizing your thinking process of the text(or math problem), use of digital tools and more, students can engage with the material.

    In math, we begin to encounter most of our texts through math problems involving one or more processes to solve the problem. For instance, when reading a word problem involving dividing mixed fractions, a student should know how to multiply fractions, change mixed to improper fractions, and know what a reciprocal is. Having this information known makes the word problem much easier to dissect the steps you need to take and what you are trying to find. As we textually learn about math, it becomes more complex thus, I would argue that textually learning about math is much different than the act of doing. Reading and working through the process(es) are vital to becoming fluent in math literacy.

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  3. ArthurDecember 9, 2024 at 3:49 PM

    Having background knowledge is helpful to scaffold off of when learning new information. It will not only build upon the knowledge you already have, it could also change some knowledge if you had thought one thing previously but then learned it was wrong. As well as having background knowledge will help you to understand the context or content of anything as you will have a rough understanding if nothing at all. For example, if I started to read something which I have no prior nor background knowledge of, all I would be reading or understanding is a bunch of words or numbers that I can't make sense of. I would be able to read it but I wouldn't know what it means and in what context. So having background knowledge is useful to our current knowledge as well as building upon it and learning more about anything.

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  4. Emily PachecoDecember 9, 2024 at 4:39 PM

    Background knowledge is essential as students will later use that knowledge to process new information given and possibly create connections. In the math discipline this is important as there are many connections one has to make and if you don't have the necessary knowledge then it is difficult to process information.

    What I found to be useful during our strategy presentations and mini lessons is that teaching is more effective when you include activities that students are currently interested in. So I would like to have a survey or some sort of activity so that I can gather information on interests of students and see in what ways I can implement it into math. Similar to how Julie, Marlen and I made a activity based on rollercoasters that included concepts of math.

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