Prior Knowledge and Its Relationship to Comprehension

A major concern among classroom teachers is that subject area textbooks are too difficult for students to comprehend.Criteria for making decisions about text difficulty are generally vague and often based on teachers' assumptions regarding student knowledge of the content and vocabulary contained in a specific text.This study develops a text specific prior knowledge measure which predicts the likelihood of a student's success in recalling the content of a reading passage.In recent years, prior knowledge and its effect on recall of text has become the focus of a number of research studies.Sonie of the findings suggest that the graphic representations depicted on a page of print are only symbols and do not, in and of themselves, carry meaning.Rather, it is the reader's prior knowledge that leads to comprehension and recall of text (Adams and Collins, 1979).New ideas and information are learned and retained most efficiently when relevant and related ideas are already available within the reader's memory.Prior knowledge serves a subsuming role by furnishing "ideational anchorage" during new learning experiences (Ausubel, 1968).A large body of research related to the organization of memory and how prior knowledge relates to comprehension and recall has been conducted.This has substantially increased our understanding of how reader/text interactions may facilitate or impede comprehension and/or recall.The organization and accessing of knowledge influences the manner in which the reader organizes the information provided by the author and the reader's organization, in turn, affects the qualify of that knowledge in recall.Comprehending a text requires readers to relate the elements in the text to knowledge characterizations in their own memory structures.Information retrieval and the recall of text are affected by the manner in which prior knowledge has been organized in memory (Anderson, Pichert and Shirey, 1977;Anderson, Reynolds, Shallert, and Goetz, 1977).The manner in which knowledge is structured facilitates the learning and remembering of information (Anderson, Spiro, and Anderson, 1978), and may provide a plan which helps readers to retrieve information (Pichert and Anderson, 1977).Pearson, Hansen and Gordon (1979) suggest that comprehension involves the integration of new information with existing schemata.If the schemata are weakly developed, comprehension is difficult.In a related study, Tannen (1979) found that anticipatory structures are based on past experience and that these