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The Baseball Study (also known as the Baseball Experiment) was an academic experiment that tested how reading comprehension is impacted by prior knowledge. In 1987, education researchers Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie tested middle school students on the topic of baseball, evaluating their results based on the participant's reading abilities and prior knowledge of baseball. They concluded that prior knowledge was just as important as reading proficiency in the student's abilities to comprehend written text.

Design and implementation

In 1987, researchers Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie developed a study to determine how much reading comprehension depended on prior knowledge of a topic. As the study was to be conducted on junior high students, they chose the topic of baseball under the assumption that the kids could potentially be familiar with the sport. Starting with 64 students, the participants were split into four groups based on their reading ability and prior knowledge of baseball. Each student read a half-page of text describing a baseball inning and were then asked to recreate the action on a model baseball field, demonstrating their comprehension of what they had just read.

The study found that the students who were previously familiar with baseball were better able to recreate the described action. According to the researchers: "Students with high reading ability but low knowledge of baseball were no more capable of recall or summarization than were students with low reading ability and low knowledge of baseball." The study also found that the students assessed as 'less proficient' readers were "better at identifying important ideas in the text and at including those ideas in summaries", skills that are considered important for overall reading comprehension. Natalie Wexler, an educational journalist, described the key takeaway as demonstrating that "the bad readers who knew a lot about baseball outperformed the good readers who didn’t".

Recht and Leslie were surprised at the results and reached the conclusion that if "educators want to accelerate student learning, it will be essential to consider students' background knowledge in the planning". They published their research in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1988.

Effects

The baseball study has been described as "elegant in its simplicity but profound in its implications". The study's findings were praised for revealing that readers with "sufficient background knowledge are able to comprehend and learn more easily because they have multiple ways to store information".

The Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) lauded the study for increasing the connection between education and the community "while also dismantling stereotypes and bridging cultural divides". It cites the study's results as a way to assist at-risk students, such as students from historically marginalized groups and low socioeconomic backgrounds, through the use of culturally relevant teaching to improve academic success.

See also

• Natalie Wexler, American author who wrote The Knowledge Gap (2019)
• Culturally relevant teaching

References

1. Henson, Elise; Lafuente, Constanze (20 February 2020). "The More Kids Know, the Better They Read". Carnegie Corporation of New York. Retrieved 19 January 2024.
2. Stanford, Libby (15 January 2024). "There's a Design Flaw With Many Reading Tests. Here's One State's Fix". Education Week. Retrieved 19 January 2024.
3. Terada, Youki (11 October 2019). "Research Zeroes In on a Barrier to Reading (Plus, Tips for Teachers)". Edutopia. Retrieved 20 January 2024.
4. Cunningham, Katie; Burkins, Jan; Yates, Kari (10 October 2023). Shifting the Balance, Grades 3-5: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading Into the Upper Elementary Classroom. Taylor & Francis. p. 18. ISBN 9781003833987. Retrieved 20 January 2024.
5. Wexler, Natalie (10 October 2019). "A Problem Hiding In Plain Sight". Albert Shanker Institute. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
6. Murray-Darden, Sonya; Turner, Gwendolyn Y. (17 May 2023). Serving Educational Equity: A Five-Course Framework for Accelerated Learning. SAGE Publications. p. 123. ISBN 9781071909508. Retrieved 23 January 2024.
7. 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. doi:10.1037/0022-0663.80.1.16. Retrieved 20 January 2024.
8. "The Baseball Experiment". CoreKnowledge.org. 15 November 2017. Retrieved 20 January 2024.
9. Lewis, William E.; Strong, John Z. (24 November 2020). Literacy Instruction with Disciplinary Texts: Strategies for Grades 6-12. Guilford Publications. p. 64. ISBN 9781462544752. Retrieved 22 January 2024.
10. Sharp, Alex (2 December 2021). "How identity-affirming texts empower literacy education". NWEA. Retrieved 22 January 2024.

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