Some reading researchers worry that too much time is being spent on background knowledge such as current events rather than reading and discussing the main idea in texts, according to an article in The Hechinger Report. Skeptics claim students aren’t going to understand what they are reading just from having more contextual knowledge about the world — they need to be directly taught how to identify the main idea and how to summarize.
“Early research showed that background knowledge plays a part,” says Kausalai Wijekumar, a professor of education at Texas A&M University, who has been studying reading instruction. “People with good background knowledge seem to be able to read faster and understand quicker.”
For some children, particularly children from affluent families, she says, background knowledge is “enough” to unlock reading comprehension, but that doesn’t apply to all students. “If we want all the children to read, we have proven that they can be taught with the right strategies,” says Wijekumar.
Drilling students on the main idea or the author’s purpose isn’t helpful because a struggling reader cannot come up with a point or a purpose without any background knowledge, she concedes. Wijekumar is a proponent of a step-by-step process, conceived in the 1970s by her mentor and research partner, Bonnie J.F. Meyer, a professor emeritus at Penn State.
The first step guides students through a series of questions about the text, such as “Is there a problem?” “What caused it?” and “Is there a solution?” Based on their answers, students decide which structure the passage follows: cause and effect, problem and solution, comparisons or a sequence. Then students fill in blanks — like in a Mad Libs worksheet — to help create a main idea statement. Finally, they practice expanding on the main idea with relevant details and a summary is formed.
“It’s very structured and systematic, and that provides a strong foundation,” Wijekumar says. “This is just the starting point. You can take it and layer on more things, but 99 percent of the children are having difficulty just starting.”
Wijekumar transformed Meyer’s strategy into a computerized tutor called ITSS, which stands for Intelligent Tutoring using the Structure Strategy. About 200,000 students around the world use ITSS. Wijekumar’s nonprofit, Literacy.IO, charges schools $40 a student plus teacher training, which can run $800 per teacher, depending on school size.
ITSS allows students to practice reading comprehension at their own pace. It was one of only three online learning technologies that demonstrated clear evidence for improving student achievement, according to a February 2021 report by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Education.
Marissa Filderman, a respected reading expert who has reviewed the literature on comprehension instruction for children who struggle with reading and is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, says despite the imperfect evidence from research, she sees Wijekumar’s body of research as evidence that explicit strategy instruction is important along with building background knowledge and vocabulary. It’s still an evolving science, though, and the research isn’t yet clear enough to guide teachers on how much time to spend on each aspect.
The Hechinger Report
