Teachers are often asked to raise reading comprehension and still cover the required social studies. It has always been incredibly hard to teach required state standards while also preparing for state exams. My view, after fourteen years teaching social studies in a Title I high school, is that those jobs should not be split apart. If students are going to read hard informational text, they need something worth knowing in the passage.

How does background knowledge help students understand hard text?

Willingham (2006), writing in American Educator, argues that factual knowledge makes new learning easier and helps reading and thinking run more smoothly, in part by letting readers chunk information and free working memory. The more students know, the more readily they can take in the next passage.

A student who already knows the setting of a passage can spend attention on the writer's purpose, or on a hard sentence, instead of using all of it just to figure out what the sentences are about. Knowing the subject is not extra credit in a reading lesson.

What did the baseball study actually find?

Recht and Leslie (1988) asked 32 seventh graders and 32 eighth graders to remember a text about baseball. Students who knew more about the subject recalled and retained more. The study found a strong main effect for prior knowledge and did not find an interaction with reading ability.

Smith, Snow, Serry, and Hammond (2021) reviewed 23 studies with mid- to late-primary students. Higher background knowledge generally helped comprehension, though the effect depended on the text, the situation model, and whether students held misconceptions. Low-knowledge readers benefited from high cohesion, and weaker readers could compensate somewhat with high knowledge. That review looked at elementary studies. I take the pattern seriously in middle school: knowledge and reading support each other.

Why does that matter for 8th grade U.S. history reading passages?

If knowledge helps students make sense of hard informational text, I do not want to strip the history out of reading practice. Teaching the required content and practicing high-level reading skills belong in the same lesson. That is why the 8th grade line is ELA reading test prep that teaches required U.S. history standards.

The passages and questions give students practice in the kinds of reading used on NAEP and the PSAT 8/9, alongside state-test-style items, while they learn the history they are already required to study. The 8th grade line is ELA reading test prep that teaches required history. I built it so each unit puts that research into practice: required history and high-level reading in the same sitting. Pulling the history out of reading time looks tidy on a schedule. Students still have to read passages that assume they already know the setting.

A live product line to look at: 8th grade U.S. History full-year bundle on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Related pages

• 8th grade U.S. History reading prep
• Content and disciplinary literacy
• Free 8th grade Constitution sampler

Sources cited

• Willingham, D. T. (2006). How knowledge helps: It speeds and strengthens reading comprehension, learning—and thinking. American Educator, 30(1). https://www.aft.org/ae/spring2006/willingham
• Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers' memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16–20. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.1.16
• Smith, R., Snow, P., Serry, T., & Hammond, L. (2021). The role of background knowledge in reading comprehension: A critical review. Reading Psychology, 42(3), 214–240. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2021.1888348