Prior Knowledge and Student Learning After spending six weeks
helping your students develop deep understandings of ideas in
your discipline, did you find students reverting to naïve
assumptions under the pressure of mid-term exams and papers? You
may have discovered one of the critical challenges to student
learning—the power of prior knowledge. On the one hand, accurate
prior knowledge provides a needed scaffold on which to build new
ideas and understandings. On the other hand, what we think we
know can be more of an impediment to learning than our
ignorance. The simplistic mental models and explanations we
build early on to make meaning of the world can be very
entrenched. Students may simply layer new ideas onto old and
discard new knowledge when information demands become too great.
So how do we get students to incorporate new ideas more facilely
into what they already know or to think in new ways about old
ideas? - Find out what students already know about a topic.
Before starting a new topic in class, e