The Background Knowledge Webinar will begin at 2:00 PM Eastern Time.

1. The Background Knowledge Webinarwill begin at 2:00 PM Eastern Time. Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2009). Background Knowledge: The Missing Piece of the Comprehension Puzzle. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

2. WebinarBackground Knowledge:The Missing Piece of the Comprehension Puzzle Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2009). Background Knowledge: The Missing Piece of the Comprehension Puzzle. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

3. Background Knowledge Is Like a Teenager’s Closet… Just because the backpack is in there, doesn’t mean he can find it!

4. How People Learn • Organized: Knowing where to find it • Conditionalized: Knowing when it is needed • Transferable: Knowing how to apply it to new situations (Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000)

5. 3 Practices Linked to Background Knowledge • Assess what students already know • Plan lessons and activities that build background knowledge • Design ways to activate students’ knowledge by having them interact with content

6. Assessing Your Practice

7. Assessing Background Knowledge

8. Assessing Your Practice Use the rubric to determine your goals for addressing misconceptions and assessing background knowledge.

9. Comparing Incidental and Core Knowledge

10. The Cask of Amontillado (Poe)

11. Core Concept in Middle School Plane Geometry

12. Originally developed for readability Now used to assess content knowledge Teacher-made 250-word passage Every fifth word deleted Scoring Independent level: 60% correct or above Instructional level: 40-59% correct Frustration level: 39% or below Cloze Assessments

13. Interest Survey in Biology

14. Opinionnaire in History

15. Activating What Students Know

16. Assessing Your Practice Use the rubric to determine your goals for building Background knowledge in your classroom.

17. The Role of Establishing Purpose • Establishing purpose is key to activating background knowledge • Include: • Content: “We’ll be learning about how fear outweighed justice when Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps in World War II.” • Language: “What words would be seen and heard that would make people more fearful?” • Social: “You’ll be working in small groups to analyze newspaper headlines from the weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

18. Text Impressions • Make a list of key words from a passage students will be reading • Ask them to write their own passage using the terms in order • Great way to assess background knowledge, and activates students’

19. Quickwrites • Brief written response to a question • Should be a thought-provoking question • Gives students a psychologically safe environment to speculate • Avoid questions that are too simplistic • Extend these quickwrite questions by inviting students to engage in structured partner discussions

20. Sentence Frames Feature academic language in a cloze format to promote background knowledge • Cause/effect: • Because _____ occurred, the results • included _____. • Compare/contrast: • _____ and _____ share several characteristics, including ______.

21. Paragraph Frames There is a lot of discussion about whether ______. The people who agree with this idea, such as _____, claim that ____. They also argue that _____. A further point they make is _____. However, there are also strong arguments against this point. _____ believes that _____. Another counterargument is _____. Furthermore, _____. After looking at the different points of view and the evidence for them, I think ____ because _____. David Wray, University of Warwick

22. Building Background Knowledge

23. Assessing Your Practice Use the rubric to determine your goals for building background knowledge in your classroom.

24. Building Background with Think-alouds • Teacher modeling of comprehension skills is effective with adolescents (Alfassi, 2004) • Provides students with insights into the ways that an expert makes cognitive decisions • An opportunity to profile discipline-specific expertise

25. Virtual Frog Dissection Lab

26. Thinking Aloud with a Calculator

27. Other Examples • Annotating a piece of text in English • Interpreting a piece of sheet music in band class • Reading and interpreting an editorial cartoon in history • Others?

28. Other Methods for Building Background Knowledge • Wide reading • Graphic organizers to strengthen schema • Guest speakers • Field trips and experiential learning

29. Background Knowledge in a Classroom

30. Activating and Building Background Knowledge in One Classroom • 8th grade social studies • Core knowledge for the course is on growth and conflict • Major theme for the course: This period of U.S. history was marked with successes and failures brought about by the decisions of leaders and citizens.

31. Assessing Background Knowledge: Opinionnaire

32. Assessing Background Knowledge: Cloze Passage

33. Activating Background Knowledge: Role Play • “Loyalists” and “Patriots” use a list of reasons offered by each to produce a broadside (newspaper) • Posted the broadsides in the hallway • Read and debated

34. Building Background Knowledge: Think-aloud She says, “I’ve heard about Parliament before. That’s the name of the group of representatives in Britain that made laws. I learned about Parliament when I read about England taking over the colonies from the Dutch one hundred years earlier. I recall now that Parliament also came up with the plan to ship prisoners from English jails to the colonies. Hmmm…it seems like Parliament didn’t always have the colonies’ best interests in mind when they made decisions.” She reads,“The colonists objected to paying King George’s taxes without having a voice in Parliament. They called it taxation without representation. And while the tax on tea was a small one, just three cents a pound, it was regarded as a symbol of British tyranny” (p. 2).

35. Building Background Knowledge: Independent Reading • Teacher provides a range of reading materials • Differentiated texts reflect the range of readers in the room • Wide reading is effective for building background knowledge IF the text isn’t too difficult

36. Building Background Knowledge: Guided Instruction

37. Questions for Analyzing Your Unit • Have I determined core versus incidental background knowledge for this topic? • Have I assessed students such that I can recognize common misconceptions? • Have I established a purpose that makes learning relevant for students? • Am I regularly activating background knowledge? • Have I modeled and demonstrated my own understanding before requiring students to complete learning tasks? • Have I focused on background knowledge that moves beyond facts and isolated skills? • Have I provided students with wide-reading opportunities to facilitate background knowledge gains? • Have I planned live and virtual experiences to build background knowledge?

38. Assessing Your Practice