In the premiere episode of Season 8 of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Susan Lambert is joined by guests Reid Smith and Pamela Snow to lay the groundwork for a season entirely centered on knowledge and knowledge-building. Reid and Pamela—of the SOLAR Lab at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia—recently co-authored (along with many others) a review of the literature on background knowledge and literacy. In this discussion, they share what they learned, including some surprising takeaways. This episode examines the  complexity of building background knowledge, the important role it plays in literacy, and the reasons we’ve decided to spend a whole season exploring it!

Show notes:

• Read: "The Role of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension: A critical review"
• Read: "Elementary Teachers' Perspectives on Teaching Reading Comprehension"
• Blog: The Snow Report 
• Website: The SOLAR Lab

Quotes:
“We decided we'd embark on a knowledge-rich curriculum where we would make deliberate decisions about what it is that we would like our students to know about the world in which we live and thinking carefully about the coherence and sequencing of that knowledge.”  —Reid Smith

“This idea of having a coherent curriculum that systematically builds knowledge and skills over time is something that we think is really important for our kids.” —Reid Smith

“There's a group of students who, even when they know they have the background knowledge that's required to make inferences in a text, they find that really difficult, that they have difficulty identifying the pieces of knowledge that they actually have that are going to enable them to make inferences with a particular text.” —Reid Smith

“Explicit teaching is an important way of building accurate background knowledge, building schema about a topic that, of course, is an important social equity lever for us to pull because not all students have equal opportunities.” —Pamela Snow

“Background knowledge has a particularly strong effect for those students who don't have other compensatory mechanisms to be able to pick up the ball when they don't have that background knowledge.” —Reid Smith

“The long-term memory makes no distinction between information that's correct or incorrect…so, of course, the incorrect knowledge would impact on our understanding." —Reid Smith

“I think we respect teacher autonomy when we give them the knowledge that they need about how the English writing system works, right across the Reading Rope, and how the English language works, right across the Reading Rope.” —Pamela Snow