The purpose of going to school is to learn, but students may find certain topics difficult to understand if they don’t have the necessary background knowledge.
«Background knowledge plays a key role in students’ reading comprehension — our findings show that if students don’t have sufficient related knowledge, they’ll probably have difficulties understanding text,» says lead researcher Tenaha O’Reilly of Educational Testing Service (ETS)’s Center for Research on Human Capital in Education. «We also found that it’s possible to measure students’ knowledge quickly by using natural language processing techniques. If a student scores below the knowledge threshold, they’ll probably have trouble comprehending the text.»
Previous research has shown that students who lack sufficient reading skills, including decoding and vocabulary, fare poorly relative to their peers. But the research of O’Reilly and ETS colleagues Zuowei Wang and John Sabatini suggests that a knowledge threshold may also be an essential component of reading comprehension.
The researchers examined data from 3,534 high-school students at 37 schools in the United States. The students completed a test that measured their background knowledge on ecosystems. For the topical vocabulary section of the test, the students saw a list of 44 words and had to decide which were related to the topic of ecosystems. They also completed a multiple-choice section that was designed to measure their factual knowledge.
Then, after reading a series of texts on the topic of ecosystems, the students completed 34 items designed to measure how well they understood the texts. These comprehension items tapped into their ability to summarize what they had read, recognize opinions and incorrect information, and apply what they had read to reason more broadly about the content.
The researchers used a statistical technique called broken-line regression — often used to identify an inflection point in a data set — to analyze the students’ performance.
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