Try this experiment: Find a friend and tell him you’re going to tap out the rhythm of a famous song that everyone knows. Without telling him what the song is, tap out the notes for “God Bless America,” “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” or “Happy Birthday to You.” No singing or humming along; just taps. Before you begin make a prediction: Do you think he’ll guess the song correctly based on your ability to tap it out?
Nearly 20 years ago, a Stanford graduate student named Elizabeth Newton did her dissertation in psychology on this simple game and discovered something remarkable. Given a list of 25 well-known songs to tap out, the listeners’ success rate was only 2.5 percent—one out of 40 attempts. However the tappers were so sure the listener would know the song, they predicted a 50% success rate.
Why the disconnect? In the experiment, the tapper hears the song in his or her mind and thinks it’s so obvious that the listener can’t possibly fail to understand it. The tapper mentally sings the words and hears the melody to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” while the listener merely hears “tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.” The tapper can’t understand why the listener doesn’t get it; the listener gets frustrated that the tapper thinks he should. Chip Heath and Dan Heath describe the phenomenon in their book Made to Stick:
The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.
As a listener, the task is hard because even though you are getting valid information, it’s incomplete. You’re not getting the whole song. Newton’s experiment offers as good a model as you’re likely to find as to why background knowledge is the key to reading comprehension— for struggling readers, what’s on the page is useful, but it’s not enough.
This is also one of the most difficult concepts to wrap your mind around. When you read, your background knowledge is the melody playing in your head. Like the tapper in the experiment, it’s impossible to forget what you know and force your mind NOT to make the connections that create understanding. Proficient readers hear the music, the lyrics, even a full orchestra. Students, especially those from low-income families or households lacking in enrichment, hear only tap, tap, tap, tap, tap tap.
The tapping experiment also shows why reading strategies don’t help. Try to determine the author’s (tapper’s) purpose. Tap, tap, tap. Can you find the main idea (melody)? Tap, tap, tap. When meaning breaks down, reread (relisten) for clarity. No matter what “strategy” you employ, if you don’t know the song, it still sounds like tap, tap, tap. Seen through this lens, reading strategies are worse than useless, only compounding the listener’s frustration. You might as well instruct students “don’t just listen to the tapping, try to hear the song in your head!” They can’t.
We all know background knowledge matters. As teachers, even devotees of strategy instruction tell students to “activate your prior knowledge” to aid in comprehension. However, we are assuming that there is background knowledge to activate. If we don’t teach the explicit content needed to guarantee comprehension, we are hearing the melody in our heads and refusing to share it.
Our students, on the other hand, hear only “tap tap tap tap tap tap.”
This is what drives me so nuts about the “Connected Math” program our district has bought into. It requires there to be something to connect to. The problem is, the students come out of Investigations, which also fails to teach any actual knowledge. Teachers are given pacing guides and curricula to which we are told to adhere religiously, leaving little to no time to teach the kids what they need to know to understand the lessons. It’s only because I have my kids for 1.5 hours per day that I’m able to work in what they need.
This is about the most profound article about modern teaching I have read in a very long time. It reminds me of James Burke’s classic series, “The Day the Universe Changed.” You only see what your knowledge tells you you’re seeing. To see properly requires a background store of knowledge. Especially in urban districts, too many kids are coming in without this basic cache of knowledge. This needs to be filled in before anything else is possible.
Thanks for a vivid way to explain the need for background knowledge.
Wonderful analogy.
That was a really well-presented analogy. You should be a teacher!
I’m not familiar with Newton’s research–but something very similar to what she did happens all the time in musical ear-training: familiar rhythmic patterns are played, and listeners transpose the patterns into symbolic notation. Even without pitch, seeing the patterns often causes the transcriber to be able to attach that visual to a familiar song.
I have done this with kids as young as 3rd grade, with a fair degree of success. They get better at it with practice, in fact. Seeing the notation gives them a reference point for running the rhythm through their mental library and checking for matches. If I gave them a pool of songs to choose from (even a large pool), they could pick the correct song with impressive accuracy, simply by hearing the rhythm. In other words, if Newton had used a multiple choice format, schoolkids could not only identify the song, but transcribe it, if the notation were simple enough. A song like “Twinkle, Twinkle” would be drop-dead easy for most 10-year olds.
This does not negate your point: all learning is easier if the learner has background knowledge. The learner constructs new knowledge around and in relationship to old, practiced knowledge. And sometimes, old knowledge is definitely a curse. At this very moment, millions of people are trying to reconcile what they “know” about the American health care system by grafting it on to other systems.
You might also be surprised at how few songs are universal in the American consciousness. Lots of research on the shrinking % of Americans who know either the words or the tune to the national anthem.
Very powerful analogy. I hesitate to say that it is absolutely impossible to think back to the earlier state, when one was without the knowledge. But it certainly very, very difficult. This is one of the most significant challenges facing editors who are working on children’s material.
Good article. My school district has bought into a program called “C-Scope,” and many of the teachers are questioning some of the claims being made by the company as to its effectiveness. Does anybody out there know anything about this curriculum?
Given that a child can decode text reasonably fluently it has always seemed to me that reading comprehension problems are really oral comprehension problems. In other words if someone read the problematic passage to the child they would be no better off. A fluent adult reader with presumably all the right reading strategies available to them would not be able to adequately comprehend a highly technical text on an unfamiliar topic even though they sound like they are ‘tapping out the right tune’.
Even worse time spent on learning comprehension strategies means less time actually reading.