Thinking About College Teaching
by Glenda Wilkes, Ph.D.
 

Volume 2: How Prior Knowledge Impacts New Learning

A central and consistent finding from research is that what students already know and how that knowledge is organized affects both the content and the processes of additional learning. College students come to their course work with great variability in the amount of content-specific prior knowledge as well as effective strategies for learning and integrating new concepts. Bruer (1993) suggests that much of students’ prior knowledge is fragmentary and local, and often contains misconceptions that may interfere with accurate learning.

College students spend a significant amount of time reading texts. We, as instructors, often assume that students are able to integrate this new material with their prior knowledge in an accurate and efficient manner. However, this is not always the case.

Roth (1995) identified five strategies for learning new material, only one of which resulted in restructuring prior knowledge by integrating the new material.

• Overreliance on the Sufficiency of Prior Knowledge: Students reported they "know this stuff before" and that the text was repetitious.
• Overreliance on Text Vocabulary: Students isolated new words out of context and equated understanding with mindless vocabulary acquisition.
• Overreliance on Factual Information: Students who see learning as an accumulation of facts may be able to accurately recall bits of information without integrating them.
• Overreliance on Existing Beliefs: When integrating text knowledge with existing prior knowledge, these students used the text to confirm existing knowledge, rather than modifying it, even when the new information was inconsistent with their existing framework.
• Conceptual-Change Students: These students see course materials as a vehicle for integrating old ideas with new knowledge. They not only learned the main ideas in the text but were able to verbalize where course materials conflicted with their existing knowledge. They were willing to revise old understandings to incorporate the new.

Bruning et al. (1995), in discussing Roth’s findings, suggest that the best way to avoid the first four kinds of learning described above is by finding out what students already know about new concepts introduced in classes. They suggest individual interviews, when time permits, such as in labs, seminars, and other small groups. When individual interviews are not possible, group discussions around an exposing event which stimulates students to reveal their prior knowledge allows instructors to challenge preconceptions and help students begin to construct new and more accurate frameworks.

The next issue of Thinking About College Teaching will summarize models in which college instructors can impact the accuracy and efficiency of knowledge restructuring in their students.

References

Bruer, J. (1993). Schools for Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bruning, R., Schraw, G., and Ronning R. (1995). Cognitive Psychology and Instruction, Second Edition. New Jersey: Merrill.

Roth, K.J. (1985). Conceptual change learning and student processing of science texts. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago.

Vosniadou, S., and Brewer, W. (1987). Theories of knowledge restructuring in development. Review of Educational Research, 57(1): 51-67.