The idea of forcing children to learn a specific set of facts and topics is controversial. It is contrary to the more tendencies of “pedagogy“Or“culturally responsive teaching“In which critics claim that students’ identity should be reflected in what has been learned. Others say that learning facts is unimportant in the Google era, where we can immediately look at everything and that the focus should be on teaching skills. The skeptics of content also point out that there has never been a study to show that increasing knowledge of world stimulates reading results.
For an individual teacher, it would be almost impossible to create the type of content packed by the content that this branch of education researchers refers to education researchers. The lessons should be coordinated in the grades, from kindergarten onwards. This is not only a random collection of encyclopedia recordings or interesting units, say, Greek myths or planets in our solar system. The topics of science and social research must be sequenced so that ideas are built on top of each other and dictionary that will be useful in the future.
The big question is whether the theory that more knowledge improves reading understanding is applied to real schools where children read below the level of class. Content-packed curriculum becomes higher reading achievements years later?
Testion
Researchers test lessons packed with content in schools to see how much they enhance the reading understanding. A 2023 study From the basic curriculum of knowledge that has not been reviewed, he received a lot of buzzing. The students who attended nine schools adopted the curriculum were stronger readers. But it was It is impossible to say whether the main curriculum of knowledge itself has made the difference Or if the impetus of reading results may be due to the fact that all nine schools have been highly valued charter schools and do something else that matters. They may have hired great teachers and have trained them well, for example. Also, students in these charter schools were largely from the middle and upper middle -class families. What we really want to know is whether the construction of knowledge at school helps the oldest children who are less likely to be exposed to the world through travel, live performances and other experiences that money can buy.
Another heavy content program developed by Harvard Education Professor James Kim has produced a modest impetus to reading results in a randomized controlled testaccording to paper Posted in 2024S The reading instruction was untouched, but students received special science and social research lessons that were intended to enhance the knowledge and dictionary of young children. Unfortunately, the pandemic blow to the middle of the experiment and many of the lessons had to be scrapped.
However, for 1000 students who received some of the special lessons in the first and second grades, their results from reading and mathematics of state tests in North Carolina were higher not only in third grade but also in fourth grade, more than a year After that, after a year after the knowledge of knowledge was completed. Most of the students were black and Spanish. Forty percent were from poor families.
The last study
The basic curriculum of knowledge was put to a test in Another study From a team of eight researchers in two unidentified cities in the Middle Atlantic and in the south, where the majority of children were black and low-income families. More than 20 schools were randomly assigned to give kindergartens with some lessons from the basic knowledge program. The schools continued with their usual recording instructions, but the time “read aloud”, when a teacher usually reads a student’s picture book, was replaced by units of plants, farming and indigenous Americans, for example. More than 500 kindergartens looked at the big screen photos while a teacher discussed the topics and taught a new dictionary. Additional activities confirmed the lessons.
According to a A document published in the edition of February 2025 From the magazine for psychology of education 565 children who received the basic knowledge lessons, they did better on tests and words that were taught, compared to 626 children who learned to read as usual and were not exposed to These topics. But they did not do better in the tests in common language, developing a dictionary or understanding of listening. The reading itself was not appreciated. Unfortunately, the pandemic also intervenes in the middle of this experiment and interrupted the analysis of students in the first and second grades.
Leading researcher Sonia Cable, Assistant Professor at Florida State University, says she is considering data on longer achievements than those students who are now in high school. But she said she did not see a clear “signal” that students who had this basic knowledge instructions for several months in kindergarten do better.
Glitter
Cable saw glimpses of hope. Students at the control group schools who did not receive basic instructions for knowledge also learned about plants. But the basic knowledge that students had a lot more to say when researchers asked them the question: “Tell me everything you know about plants.” have been able to transfer the specific knowledge they have learned in the lessons of a broader understanding of science.
“There are pieces of those who are promising and encouraging,” says a cable that says it is difficult to study the combination of conventional reading instructions, such as phonika and dictionary, with content knowledge. “We need to understand better what the active ingredient is. Is it knowledge? ”
All the most major knowledge studies prove that students are more likely to do a good test for something that has been learned. Some observers mistakenly interpret this as proof that it is a knowledge -rich curriculum usefulS
“If your great new curriculum reads articles about children’s penguins, and your old stupid curriculum reads articles about the walms to them, one of them will look more successful when the children are evaluated with a penguin test,” explained Tim Shanahan, A literacy expert and professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois in Chicago, who did not participate in this study.
Expanding gaps in achievement
And painfully, the students who have arrived in kindergarten with stronger language skills have absorbed much more than these content-rich lessons than the lower students’ achievements. Instead of helping children’s low achievements to catch up, the gaps in achievement have expanded.
People with more knowledge tend to be better readers. This is not proof that increasing knowledge improves reading. Higher achievement of children is possible to learn about the world and enjoy reading. And if you fill a child with more knowledge, his / her reading skills may not improve.
The long view
Shanahan speculates that if building knowledge improves reading understanding, it will take many, many years to manifest.
“If these efforts are not allowed to elbow a sound reading instruction aside, they cannot harm and in the long run can even help,” he writes in 2021 blog postS
Researchers are still in the early stages of content design and testing that students need to enhance literacy skills. We are all waiting for answers.
