From Best Research to What Works: Background Knowledge & Reading Proficiency

This publication is a transcription of a forum held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on May 19, 2006 on background knowledge and reading proficiency. This topic goes to the heart of the education reform agenda, according to the first speaker, Eugenia Kemble, executive director of the Albert Shanker Institute, the sponsor of this forum. This forum was moderated by Nat LaCour (Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers) and featured speakers E.D. Hirsch, Jr. (author, "The Knowledge Deficit") and Donald Deshler (Director, Center for Research on Learning, University of Kansas). Research has demonstrated that students' vocabulary and background knowledge are vital to reading comprehension, and that poor children and struggling readers are disproportionately disadvantaged by this fact. Forum participants discussed the implications of these findings for improving curriculum and instruction at the elementary and secondary levels, including ideas of how schools might impart this knowledge to students who do not read well enough to acquire it from the written word.