Educators of adults are often urged to use the prior personal experience of their students as a pedagogic resource. Students have expectations that their narratives will be heard and valued. Whether this can--or should--be achieved in a particular discipline, in a course with a relatively fixed curriculum and formal assessment, is the issue…

In this article, the authors discuss thematic solutions using young adult literature to increase reading comprehension. Here, they emphasize that prior knowledge plays a very important role in the reading process. As students read, they actively "construct meaning through the integration of existing and new knowledge and the flexible use of…

In the context of a research project on the role of prior knowledge state (PKS) in the learning process in a modular education system, a study of the literature was done in order to construct a conceptual map of "prior knowledge." In addition, a study was carried out in order to operationalize the concept of prior knowledge, to construct…

To examine the link between analytic and holistic modes of processing and the amount of domain knowledge, 2 category-learning studies were conducted with 5-year-old children. In the first study, 26 kindergarten children were classified according to their verbal knowledge about plants and their familiarity with flowers. They then performed a…

Effects of mobilizing prior knowledge on information processing were studied with 3 groups of 12 adult subjects each. The assumption that activating different kinds of prior knowledge would induce different information processing activities during subsequent text processing (inferencing or elaborating) was tested using passages about fishing…

This project was developed and implemented in a private school in southeastern Florida to assess whether different instructional strategies would improve vocabulary recall, comprehension, and long-range retention in third graders. The program uses three approaches to provide vocabulary development: (1) contextual use of vocabulary; (2) the use of…

This study examined adult students' informal knowledge of percent and its relationship to their computational skills. Sixty adults studying in urban and suburban adult education programs were interviewed to ascertain: (1) their ideas of the meanings of benchmark percents, 100%, 50%, and 25%, as they appear in advertising and media contexts; (2)…

A study examined how many of 11 key words in 4 famous Mother Goose nursery rhymes were understood by parents of first graders. The first questionnaire (designed to determine if context clues were helpful in deciphering what words meant) was returned by 37 parents in an urban school district and by 49 parents in a suburban school district. The…

To characterize basic processes of reading comprehension, this report focuses on how the reader's schemata, or knowledge already stored in memory, function in the process of interpreting new information and allowing it to enter and become a part of the knowledge store. The paper first traces the historical antecedents of schema theory, then…

Just as all perceptions are of figures differentiated from a larger background, a play takes place against the background of the audience's knowledge and feelings. While audience members generally bring to a performance a large body of background information--they evaluate the storyline, for example, using a lifetime of personal experience--at…

The learner's existing schema, which is defined here as an integrated structure of knowledge about a given topic, plays a critical role in new learning. Prior to or during learning, appropriate schemata should be activated in order to produce the best learning results. Instructional designers should systematically assess their target audience's…

A study of reader response to stylistically poor prose indicated that the negative effects were greater if the topic was familiar to the readers. The readers were not measuring the stylistic quality of the text, but rather, the texts were measuring the cultural information of the readers. It is not possible to separate reading skills from the…

A study tested a theory of inferencing strategies. Subjects were 40 sixth grade students of average intelligence from a large Western Canadian city who were divided according to reading proficiency and background knowledge. Six passages, three familiar to the students and three unfamiliar to them, were written by the researcher in such a manner…

Two studies using the same texts and procedures but different experimental designs (1) evaluated an instrument designed to identify children who overrely on their prior knowledge in the interpretation of written text, and (2) investigated how degree of congruency of information interacts with degree of explicitness and level of staging to affect…

Research indicates that prior knowledge is an exceptionally important determiner of reading comprehension. Many of the prereading strategies currently used to assist reading comprehension do not help teachers identify what students already know about a topic. In an effort to integrate instructional assessment with prereading instruction, the…