A cricketer whose bowling average is 12.4 runs per wicket takes 5 wickets for 26 runs and thereby decreases their average by 0.4. How many wickets were taken by the cricketer until the last match?
I can’t remember where I came across that question. It’s still findable on a couple of websites, but I think the first time I encountered it was years ago … perhaps in an ESL teaching resource? I do remember that the author had used this word problem to illustrate the importance of vocabulary knowledge for reading comprehension and solving word problems.
Unless you are familiar with cricket, you may have stumbled while reading the above passage, just like I did. Sure, I can decode it and read it fluently, but I have no idea what on this glorious green earth it means. I have never played cricket. Don’t know the rules. I’m not familiar with any of the special terms (I had to google “cricket vocabulary” to come up with the title of this blog). It bears saying that it’s not just the vocabulary that stumps me in that question, it’s the context; when I first read it, the entire thing was so befuddling I had difficulty determining even the first step in solving the math. Wickets? The only Wicket I know anything about is the Ewok who helped Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi. And I strongly suspect that will not help me here.
Since my teachers’ college days, I have heard about the importance of activating students’ background knowledge for reading and other curriculum tasks. Background knowledge is critical in supporting all students’ new learning, and yet instances abound when they may encounter curriculum material that is academically and experientially unfamiliar, and culturally embedded. How many times have I seen smart, capable, students stop in confusion when reading a text about going camping, building a snow fort, or ordering a meal in a restaurant from a menu … If you have never done these things before, how would you make meaningful connections to a story about them? How would you understand the main point of the text? Or solve a math question related to it?
All of this leads me to a professional resource I recently read: Teaching Foundational Skills to Adolescent Readers by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Sarah Ortega, Kierstan Barbee, and Aida Allen-Rotell. In their chapter on background knowledge, the authors summarize the key findings of multiple studies on the effect of background knowledge on learning, and one section in particular offers a helpful distillation:
“When students’ background knowledge is strong, they can more readily comprehend complex texts because as they read, they are able to fill in missing or incomplete information that the author assumed readers know (Ozuru et al., 2009). Conversely, when students’ background knowledge is lacking, comprehension can suffer even for the most motivated readers because they have more difficulty making the logical leaps necessary to fill in the blanks (Elbro & Buch-Iverson, 2013).” (Fisher et al., 2025, p. 35)
So, we know background knowledge has a significant impact on learning new material. But how do we build background knowledge for learners who may not have the experiences and prior learning required to optimally engage with curriculum tasks? And what level of background knowledge is sufficient to make that knowledge, as the multiple studies in the book term it, “usable”?
I wish I could show you the graphic the authors created to illustrate the necessary components of usable background knowledge; it ties it all together nicely. As a short description, the graphic is a simple circle. The words “Background Knowledge” sit in the very center of this circle, and three interconnected qualities surround it in a continuous cycle: “organized”, “conditionalized”, and “transferrable” (Fisher et al., 2025, p. 38). To paraphrase the authors’ descriptions, students must have not only an awareness of the topic and its associated vocabulary, but this knowledge must also be organized and connected to other facts, creating a global understanding of the topic rather than disconnected terms and bits of information (defining the term “wicket” may help me a bit, but I need more context); the learner must also know in what conditions it is appropriate to use this knowledge (the authors use a fable to illustrate this one, so I will as well – a student may know a lot about lions and their habitats, but that information isn’t needed when analyzing the moral of the fable The Lion and the Mouse); and finally, the learner must be able to transfer that knowledge to new situations in order to learn (Fisher et al., 2025, pp. 38-42).
Essentially, it is not enough to give students the definitions of unfamiliar words, or perfunctory overviews of unfamiliar topics, before engaging in academic tasks related to them. There is a difference, they quote, between “disconnected facts” and “usable knowledge” (How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, 2000, p. 11, as cited in Fisher et al., 2025).
All of this emphasizes to me the importance of knowing our students, their experiences, their backgrounds. It also highlights the importance of critically evaluating teaching topics and resources … are they familiar and accessible to everyone, or just to students with specific backgrounds and experiences? And how can we guide students in developing their background knowledge, and knowing when and how to use it? To transfer it to new situations?
The authors offer a number of ideas in this regard: initial student self-assessments to determine background knowledge, anticipation guides, and variations on KWL charts by adding a “Use” column as well, so that students are not only recording what they know and want to know about a topic, and what they ended up learning, but also how they will use and apply this information in new contexts.
This entry is not meant to be a comprehensive explainer of the authors’ work by any means, but rather a reflection to pique interest. If you have access to a copy, there are lots of practical, research-backed strategies for your classroom. And many of the studies they cite are available free online too, including some of those listed below.
Good luck – Yub nub!
References
Elbro, C., & Buch-Iversen, I. (2013). Activation of background knowledge for inference making: Effects on reading comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 17(6), 435–452.
Fisher, D., Frey, N., Ortega, S., Barbee, K., Allen-Rotell, Aida. (2025). Teaching foundational skills to adolescent readers. Corwin Press.
National Research Council. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. In J.D. Bransford, A.L. Brown, & R. Cocking (Eds.), Commission on behavioral and social sciences and education. National Academy Press.
Ozuru, Y., Dempsey, K., & McNamara, D. S. (2009). Prior knowledge, reading skill, and text cohesion in the comprehension of science texts. Learning and Instruction, 19(3), 228–242. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2008.04.003
