When students can connect what they are learning to accurate and relevant prior knowledge, they learn and retain more. In essence, new knowledge “ sticks ” better when it has prior knowledge to stick to. In one study focused on recall, for example, participants with variable knowledge of soccer were presented with scores from different soccer matches and their recall was tested. People with more prior knowledge of soccer recalled more scores (Morris et al., 1981 ). Similarly, research conducted by Kole and Healy (2007) showed that college students who were presented with unfamiliar facts about well - known individuals demonstrated twice the capacity to learn and retain those facts as students who were presented with the same number of facts about unfamiliar individuals. Both these studies illustrate how prior knowledge of a topic can help students integrate new information.
However, students may not spontaneously bring their prior knowledge to bear on new learning situations (see the discussion of transfer in Chapter Four). Thus, it is important to help students activate prior knowledge so they can build on it productively. Indeed, research suggests that even small instructional interventions can activate students ’ relevant prior knowledge to positive effect. For instance, in one famous study by Gick and Holyoak (1980) , college students were presented with two problems that required them to apply the concept of convergence. The researchers found that even when the students knew the solution to the fi rst problem, the vast majority did not think to apply an analogous solution to the second problem. However, when the instructor suggested to students that they think about the second problem in relation to the fi rst, 80 percent of the student participants were able to solve it. In other words, with minor prompts and simple reminders, instructors can activate relevant prior knowledge so that students draw on it more effectively (Bransford & Johnson, 1972 ; Dooling & Lachman, 1971 ).
Research also suggests that asking students questions specifi cally designed to trigger recall can help them use prior knowledge to aid the integration and retention of new information (Woloshyn, Paivio, & Pressley, 1994 ). For example, Martin and Pressley (1991) asked Canadian adults to read about events that had occurred in various Canadian provinces. Prior to any instructional intervention, the researchers found that study participants often failed to use their relevant prior knowledge to logically situate events in the provinces where they occurred, and thus had diffi culty remembering specifi c facts. However, when the researchers asked a set of “ why ” questions (for example, “ Why would Ontario have been the fi rst place baseball was played? ” ), participants were forced to draw on their prior knowledge of Canadian history and relate it logically to the new information. The researchers found that this intervention, which they called elaborative interrogation , improved learning and retention signifi cantly.
Researchers have also found that if students are asked to generate relevant knowledge from previous courses or their own lives, it can help to facilitate their integration of new material (Peeck, Van Den Bosch, & Kruepeling, 1982 ). For example, Garfi eld and her colleagues (Garfi eld, Del Mas, & Chance, 2007 ) designed an instructional study in a college statistics course that focused on the concept of variability — a notoriously diffi cult concept to grasp. The instructors fi rst collected baseline data on students ’ understanding of variability at the end of a traditionally taught course. The following semester, they redesigned the course so that students were asked to generate examples of activities in their own lives that had either high or low variability, to represent them graphically, and draw on them as they reasoned about various aspects of variability. While both groups of students continued to struggle with the concept, post - tests showed that students who had generated relevant prior knowledge outperformed students in the baseline class two to one.
Exercises to generate prior knowledge can be a double - edged sword, however, if the knowledge students generate is inaccurate or inappropriate for the context (Alvermann, Smith, & Readance, 1985 ). Problems involving inaccurate and inappropriate prior knowledge will be addressed in the next two sections.
Implications of This Research Students learn more readily when they can connect what they are learning to what they already know. However, instructors should not assume that students will immediately or naturally draw on relevant prior knowledge. Instead, they should deliberately activate students ’ prior knowledge to help them forge robust links to new knowledge.
