The Connection Between Content and Reading Comprehension

I'm a big fan of UVA cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham (I have all his trading cards and posters), and in a previous post at Teach with Picture Books I linked to his fabulous piece on The Privileged Status of Story (check it out; definitely worth a read).

So I was pretty stoked when I found a link to Willingham's video Teaching Content is Teaching Reading at Julie Niles Petersen's TWRCTank site (TWRC rhymes with “work” and stands for think, wonder, reflect, and connect).

Using some simple yet effective examples and statistics, Willingham shows that background knowledge is really key to raising comprehension.




If that's not enough evidence for you, E.D. Hirsch came to pretty much the same conclusion regarding content knowledge, as expressed in his N.Y. Times Op/Ed piece Reading Test Dummies (and he uses the same example of students with baseball knowledge which Willingham mentions in the video). While I don't always agree with every little thing Hirsch has to say, I'd still be shoulder to shoulder with him when it comes time to choose sides.

So what does this have to do with teaching novels?

This emphasis on content knowledge seems to support the practice of providing students with some fundamental context of a novel's historical period, genre attributes, author, and themes.

Jerry Spinelli's Milkweed, for example, takes place in Warsaw's newly built Jewish ghetto. The Nazis have restricted Polish Jews to a walled section of the city where they're forced to live, work, and survive by any means. Young Misha, already an experienced thief and scrounger, struggles to find an identity in a world in which he's known by many names: Stopthief, Jew, Gypsy, Runt.

While students could read this novel "cold," with little or no prior understanding of the Holocaust, I think some background knowledge of the ghetto's social complexities would really add to the story's plot, as well as help to explain many of the characters' actions and reactions to the story's events.

For this particular novel I'd recommend Children in the Ghetto, an interactive site which describes itself as

"...A website about children, written for children. It portrays life during the Holocaust from the viewpoint of children who lived in the ghetto, while attempting to make the complex experience of life in the ghetto as accessible as possible to today’s children.

Along with the description of the hardships of ghetto life, it also presents the courage, steadfastness and creativity involved in the children’s lives. One of the most important messages to be learned is that despite the hardships, there were those who struggled to maintain humanitarian and philanthropic values, care for one another, and continue a cultural and spiritual life."

By examining artifacts, writings, and first hand interviews, students gain an understanding of the "anything-to-survive" mentality which the ghetto created and demanded of its inhabitants. Students can either explore freely, taking advantage of the interactive elements, or additionally respond in writing using the printable handouts (I downloaded the handouts, available in Word format, and tweaked them according to my students' strengths and needs).

Once they've completed this exercise, students will have a mental bank of sites, sounds, stories, and symbols from which to draw upon, greatly increasing their understanding and appreciation of the novel.

Other ways to build background knowledge? Primary accounts, guest speakers, articles, web sites, picture books, video clips, personal stories, artifacts, field trips, and images. Better yet, ask the students to become the researchers. What materials can they find to construct their own knowledge?

Story's Privileged Status

"I have read that the mind treats stories differently than other types of information. It seems obvious that people like listening to stories, but it’s not obvious how to use that in the classroom. Is it really true that stories are somehow "special" and, if so, how can teachers capitalize on that fact?"

The answer to this question is well worth a read for any teacher desiring to put the power of story into their daily instruction. Cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham addresses the topic of story in his excellent article The Privileged Status of Story, one of his many Ask the Cognitive Scientist columns at the AFT's American Educator.

Daniel first defines story using four features commonly agreed upon by professional storytellers (playwrights, screenwriters, and novelists). These features (sometimes called the 4 Cs) are Causality, Conflict, Complications, and Character. Even if a teacher chooses not to tell "stories" in the traditional sense, employing just one of these features can have a profound impact on every lesson, helping to create learning that is interesting, memorable, and easier to comprehend.

Although his role is to point out the theory and research behind the well-deserved status of story, Willingham writes like a practitioner, offering suggestions which are practical and simple to implement. For you fans of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, this article is a concise, highly accessible how-to guide for putting story to work in your instruction.