When you activate your background knowledge about a subject you do all of the following except

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Assessing students’ prior knowledge allows an instructor to focus and adapt their teaching plan. For students, it helps them to construct connections between old and new knowledge. 

Why Assess Students’ Prior Knowledge? 

Determining what students already know allows you to: 

• target knowledge gaps and misconceptions
• become aware of the diversity of backgrounds in your classroom
• create a bridge between students’ previous knowledge and new material

Considerations for Assessing Prior Knowledge 

When using background knowledge assessments: 

• do not require students to put their name on the assessment
• communicate that the assessment is not graded
• use technology:  Canvas, Qualtrics,  and  classroom response systems  will quantify some of the data for you and provide graphs that you can then share with students
• share the questions with colleagues or teaching assistants to confirm that the questions make sense

Getting Started with Assessing Prior Knowledge 

Plan your background knowledge assessment by asking the following questions:

• What do you assume students already know? 
• What kinds of questions will help you confirm your assumptions? 
• What are some common misconceptions or myths related to your subject? 
• How are you going to analyze and respond to the data your pre-assessment provides? 

Some Strategies

• Make a list of 10-15 statements related to course content, including commonly held misconceptions. Have students mark "true" or "false" next to each statement.
• Canvas Quizzes and Qualtrics Surveys:
  • create a series of multiple-choice questions
  • post to Canvas as an assignment for the first class
  • do not grade the assignment, except perhaps to assign participation points
• Prepare two or three open-ended questions. Ask students to respond in two or three sentences to each question.
• Gallery Walk:  
  • place images, graphs, and excerpts from upcoming course content in the middle of a poster paper. This leaves room around the material for students to write
  • hang images around the room
  • create groups of two to four students
  • place one group in front of each poster. Give them five minutes to write observations, what they know or what they are wondering about the material

Students come to the classroom with a broad range of pre-existing knowledge, skills, beliefs, and attitudes, which influence how they attend, interpret and organize in-coming information.  How they process and integrate new information will, in turn, affect how they remember, think, apply, and create new knowledge.  Since new knowledge and skill is dependent on pre-existing knowledge and skill, knowing what students know and can do when they come into the classroom or before they begin a new topic of study, can help us craft instructional activities that build off of student strengths and acknowledge and address their weaknesses.

Once prior knowledge and skill is assessed, there is a range of potential responses, depending upon the type of course, the uniformity of results, and the availability and type of supplemental materials and alternatives.  For example, if a majority of the class possesses misconceptions or weak understanding of a concept that you viewed as a critical prerequisite, you may decide to include covering it in class, provide a supplementary session on it, or provide links to materials for students to engage with on their own. Similarly, if most students demonstrate proficiency in a skill you were planning to cover, you may decide to drop it and replace it with another skill that they have not yet developed, or adjust the level of complexity or time you spend on it.  Individual students lacking many of the prerequisite skills and knowledge could be encouraged to take prerequisite courses or be forewarned that they need to develop proficiency in areas on their own if they are to succeed in the course.  Thus assessing prior knowledge can enable both the instructor and the student to allocate their time and energies in ways that will be most productive.

Examples of Methods for Assessing Prior Knowledge and Skills

There are several different methods to assess pre-existing knowledge and skills in students.  Some are direct measures, such as tests, concept maps, portfolios, auditions, etc, and others are more indirect, such as self-reports, inventory of prior courses and experiences, etc.  Below are links to some methods that instructors at Carnegie Mellon and elsewhere have employed.

Concept Inventories

Concept inventories are multiple choice or short answer tests that target fundamental concepts within a domain. These tests are designed to uncover systematic misconceptions.

• Example 1: Mechanics This link contains sample items from the Mechanics Baseline Test (Hestenes & Wells, 1992).  The test is designed for students who have received some formal instruction on mechanics and is meant to assess conceptual understanding, not quantitative skills.
• Example 2: Statics This link contains sample items from a Statics Inventory developed by Paul Steif, Carnegie Mellon.

Concept maps

Concept map activities can reveal the underlying structure or organization of students knowledge of a concept or constellation of concepts. These are very helpful when the kinds of causal theories and relations among ideas are critical to them understanding the course materials.

• How to Create Concept Maps

Self-Assessment Probes

Self-assessment probes are indirect methods of assessment that ask students to reflect and comment on their level of knowledge and skill across a range of items.  These items can include knowledge and skills that are prerequisites for the course as well as items that will be addressed in the course.

• Student Self-Assessment Methods

"Activating prior knowledge is something that we do naturally as adult readers, as mature readers. We always relate what we're reading to something we know. As a matter of fact when we read we really have to think about those connections. Sometimes students don’t access their background knowledge because they never think that it's important or if they don’t have the background knowledge the teacher doesn’t have an opportunity to really build that background knowledge" (Clewell, 2012). 

​ Definition/Description: Activating Prior Knowledge is important in students understanding, because it allows them and helps make connections to the new information. By using what students already know, it helps the teacher assist students with the learning process because it give him/her an idea of what students know and what they still need to learn. It is simply to use background knowledge to make understanding of what the text mean. According to schema theory, as students learn about the world, they develop a schema and are allowed to make connections to many other things. Piaget’s schema theory make activating prior knowledge before reading essential, because according to his research when we can connect something “old” to something new it helps us better understand the new. As students are reading they are able to access their schema and make understand of the text and use their experiences. When students and teachers applied schema theory to reading comprehension readers constantly connect their background knowledge to the new knowledge in a text to help them make sense of the reading (Gunning, 2012).   The YouTube video to the left  is demonstrating how to activate student's prior knowledge before the lesson to help them figure out what the text might be about. It also talks about how student use their schema to help them predict what the text might be about. The teacher questions her students to elicit their knowledge before.  ​​This video is for 6-8th grades for reading ELLs. This video demonstrated how to incorporate students prior knowledge to understand the text. This is important to have background information that one can relate to a text, especially when English is not the first language of the student.

The picture to the left demonstrates how this strategy helps students before and during reading to use what they already know and apply it to the new information/topic   Justification: This is a broad strategy that uses many different strategies and graphic organizers to help students comprehend what they read. From our text it stress how background knowledge and activating prior knowledge are not the same, but how teachers can use the prior knowledge to know what students need and build on what they know and what is from their culture (Echevarría, Vogt, and Short, 2013). This strategy helps ELLs because they all have different background, but all of their experiences can be used to help better understand a new concept.  According to text when teachers assist students in developing their background knowledge and using their experience for learning new information it helps them gain a better understand of the content, because they are able to use what they already know (Echevarría, Vogt, and Short, 2013).​ The quote above is from this video by Suzanne Clewell. In the video she describes how activating prior knowledge is not natural for students, however it is a good strategy to help student comprehend their readings. In the video she state it builds background knowledge which according to our text is critical in student literacy development (Echevarría, Vogt, and Short, 2013).​

​Purpose: To help them make connections of prior knowledge and apply it into the new material. This helps students understanding what they are reading. Since background knowledge is made up of a person's experiences with the world, with his or her concepts for how written text works, word identification, print concepts, word meaning, and how text is organized, students are constantly able to apply prior learning into the new information.

Tips:  Have questions prepared to ask students. Use visual representations Model the first time Allow students to communicate with others and share.

Content Area Examples:
Reading:

• Questioning before, during, or after a story.
• Have students share an experience related to the topic with a partner. 
• Relating a story that might be in their culture, such as Cinderella is in many different cultures 

Math:

• Questioning before, during, or after lesson, activity, etc.
• Have student relate new material to existing, for example how does adding and subtracting relate.
• How can you use same math strategies in a new concept, example how does problem solving tie over from adding to subtracting.
• The picture to the right demonstrates how students can use their prior knowledge in math. It is showing how using prior knowledge can eliminate taking the load road to solve a problem and simply using short cuts about what we already know to solve! 

Science:

• Questioning before, during, or after lesson, activity, etc.
• Real life experience they have has related to the topic.

Lesson Example: The lesson below demonstrate how students can use more than just information, but they can also use their prior experience, such as sense, to help understand a book. This would help ELLs because even though our language is different our sense are the same, unless there is a disability. This lesson example demonstrates how this strategy is one way that ELLs can use what they have already experiences, including there senses, and apply it to something completely new. 
(Into the book, 2015)

Additional Links for: Information, Lessons, and Material

References:
Echevarría, J., Vogt, M. E., & Short, D. (2013). Making content comprehensible for Elementary English language learners: The SIOP model. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Gunning, T. G. (2012). Creating literacy instruction for all children in grades pre-K to 4. 2nd Edition. Boston: A and B.

​Into the book: Reading Resources (2015). Activating your five senses lesson. [imagine] Retrieved on September 18, From //reading.ecb.org/ Stec, M., (2014).Prior knowledge (Schema) Anchor Char). [imagine]. Retrieved September 18, From 2015.//www.pinterest.com/pin/182184747401665335/

​Wayne Township HOSTS (n.d).  [Chart with definition and use before and during reading]. Retrieved September 18, From

//www.wayne.k12.in.us/hosts/reading_strag.asp