When I say these words to an adult, “… there is a way of walking with crutches so that your arms hold your weight and not your shoulders,” I can quickly separate those who have experience with walking with crutches from those who do not. Experience creates a defining understanding that can be described or shown but never fully appreciated without having the experience. Women who have experienced childbirth will always hold men at bay by saying “… it’s nothing like childbirth.” That is an experience men can conceptualize but never fathom, thanks be.
Knowing that experience is king in creating a clear understanding of a concept, imagine the disparity among children when we begin talking about a subject that some have experienced but others have not. It is no wonder that the inexperienced give us back a blank look – they have no prior knowledge of what we are trying to describe in words. However, those who have prior knowledge through personal experience leap ahead in their ability to associate our words with what they already know. What an advantage!
“A zebra is a horse with stripes.” Children who have not seen a zebra can only wonder if the stripes run from head to tail. Is there one stripe or are there many stripes? How wide are the stripes? Is the tail also striped? But, children who have been to a zoo and seen a zebra or whose parents have used picture books to show them pictures of zebras have a clear mental picture of this striped horse.
A child’s quantity and quality of background information is associated with that child’s knowledge of words and phrases associated with that information. Early studies found that children who are raised in families on welfare have about 70% of the vocabulary of children who are raised in working families and about 45% of the vocabulary of children raised in professional families. Each child’s wealth of words is derived from their exposure to the word or picture or real-world experiences.
A child who is raised looking at National Geographic magazines or whose parents have taken him on trips to the mountains or seashore or museums or who has access to many books, especially books with pictures, or whose parents watch informational television, like the Discovery Channel, has an unbelievable advantage over children who have not been exposed to these informational enrichments. Hence, new information can make sense to a child a strong with strong background information and be meaningless to children without such background.
Of course, there are concepts that children cannot experience. To an extreme, space travel is outside their experience. However, children who have read stories about long sea voyages or biographies about explorers or watched science fiction movies have experiences that help them to conceptualize what space travel might be like. Once again, a child without wide ranging reading and viewing will have more difficulty creating a semblance of space travel.
Background knowledge can be separated into information that is “school-based” or academic and information that is “non-school based” or real world. A streetwise child will have a real life advantage over a more sheltered child when both are trying to navigate an urban landscape. However, later life success as measured by career ladders and economic status is much more related to academic knowledge than real world knowledge and children who have stronger background knowledge at an early age have a real advantage in sculpting their pathway along a variety of careers and financial earnings.
That leaves teachers with the challenge of teaching around the deficit in background knowledge or working to backfill a child’s background deficit. Needless to say, teaching around a deficit only makes the deficit a greater obstacle for future learning.
Direct Method – these are first-hand experiences that a child has that provide a direct imprint of information into the child’s frame of reference. Marzano (Teaching Basic and Advanced Vocabulary, ASCD, 2010) identifies 8,007 terms and phrases in 17 subject areas. 2,845 of the terms and phrases are basic and 5,162 are advanced or related to a specific academic subject area. Marzano’s work develops a strategy that will position a child so that she has a quantitative and qualitative working vocabulary that should allow her to meet the needs of academic learning and content area specialization.
Marzano’s six-step approach to vocabulary development has application for classroom teachers and parents at home. The English language has so many terms and phrases that it is impossible to accommodate all of them through direct instruction in school. Hence, school and home can work together to build a child’s academic vocabulary.
Creating a working vocabulary of basic and advanced terms and phrases allows a child without strong background knowledge to close the gap between what they understand and what experientially-rich children understand.
Beyond direct vocabulary instruction, there are a myriad of ways to expose a child to background information. School-based field trips and parent-led family trips yield an incalculable amount of visual, hands-on experiences which are turned into the words and phrases of knowledge. Trips to museums, zoos, monuments, forests, memorials, exhibition halls, demonstrations, aquariums and planetariums, foreign lands, and even outer space are rich with information. And, every child can experience these – virtually.
The most effective and efficient strategy for indirectly growing background information is through virtual means and every school can do this. If we believe that every child can learn and succeed, we need to individualize a curriculum of virtual field trips and simulated experiences for our most background-deprived and grow them into backgrounded children.