The effects of activating prior topic and metacognitive knowledge on text comprehension scores

Research on prior knowledge activation has consistently shown that activating learners' prior knowledge has beneficial effects on learning. If learners activate their prior knowledge, this activated knowledge serves as a framework for establishing relationships between the knowledge they already possess and new information provided to them. Thus far, prior knowledge activation has dealt primarily with topic knowledge in specific domains. Students, however, likely also possess at least some metacognitive knowledge useful in those domains, which, when activated, should aid in the deployment of helpful strategies during reading.

In this study, we investigated the effects of both prior topic knowledge activation (PTKA) and prior metacognitive knowledge activation (PMKA) on text comprehension scores.

Eighty-eight students in primary education were randomly distributed amongst the conditions of the 2 × 2 (PTKA yes/no × PMKA yes/no) designed experiment.

Results show that activating prior metacognitive knowledge had a beneficial effect on text comprehension, whereas activating prior topic knowledge, after correcting for the amount of prior knowledge, did not.

Most studies deal with explicit instruction of metacognitive knowledge, but our results show that this may not be necessary, specifically in the case of students who already have some metacognitive knowledge. However, existing metacognitive knowledge needs to be activated in order for students to make better use of this knowledge.