////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Newman, Kaefer, & Pinkham (2014) write, “There is a virtual consensus that background knowledge is essential for reading comprehension” (p. 145).
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Taberski (2011) suggests, “Children need to see us stop short as a passage puzzles us. They need to hear us think out loud about why it isn’t making sense and what we’ll do to get our thinking back on track” (p. 157).
Taberski, S. (2011). Comprehension from the ground up. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Neuman, S. B., Kaefer, T., & Pinkham, A. (2014). Building Background Knowledge. The Reading Teacher, 68(2), 145-148. doi:10.1002/trtr.1314
As Harvey and Goudvis (2013) point out, “supporting readers to connect their prior knowledge to new information is at the core of learning and understanding. In practice, what we really want to do is make sure kids think about what they already know so they can make sense of new information” (p. 437).
Harvey, S., & Goudvis, A. (2013). Comprehension at the Core. The Reading Teacher,
66(6), 432-439. doi:10.1002/TRTR.1145
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
During this action research, I used a pre-assessment to assess what background knowledge and schema the students had about a topic. I then read the book, Fly Guy Presents: Dinosaurs, and conducted a post-assessment over what the students knew about dinosaurs after reading the text. I based my action research off of the need that a colleague of mine had in her own classroom. Her students were struggling with using their background knowledge in order to comprehend text. She struggled with which strategies to use in order to support her student's comprehension of text. As I planned the action research that I would conduct with three students, I used the works of Rosenblatt (Tracey & Morrow, 2017) to reinforce my teaching strategies. I knew from Rosenblatt’s Transactional Theory that “all readers have individualized reading experiences because each reader has unique background schemata” (Tracey & Morrow, 2017, p. 62). I knew that I would need to understand the background knowledge of each individual student in order to understand the transaction they would take from the text. Through this artifact, I learned that learning is a process and children cannot be expected to regurgitate new learning after one reading of a topic. I learned that time management is important for learning.