Prior Knowledge and Learning New Information: The Rich Get Richer
By Althea Need Kaminske
This semester I’m teaching of my favorite classes - Intro to Psychology. One of the joys of this class is getting to talk about such wide range of interesting theories, tidbits, and history in Psychology. I get to teach students about functions of the brain by talking about the bizarre tale of Phineas Gage who accidentally harpooned himself in the face with iron rod and, miraculously, survived. Even if he was never really quite the same after the accident. I get to discuss the influence of psychology research in the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which cited the work of social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark - the first time psychology research was cited by the Supreme Court (1). I get to talk about how an elixir of sodium, potassium, calcium, and chloride is responsible for neurons firing - keeping your lungs breathing and thoughts in your head.
While I enjoy the variety, it is also one of the biggest challenges to teaching the class. The topics covered can differ wildly, keeping everyone on their toes. I assume that students come into this introductory course with no background knowledge of the topic as a whole, but it quickly becomes obvious that every student has some background knowledge of parts of the course. Most obviously, students with a stronger background in biology or chemistry do well when we cover neurons and the soup of ions that they live in, while the rest of the class is thrown off-kilter by the sudden appearance biochemistry in their introduction to psychology course.
Every student comes into class with some type of prior knowledge which influences how well they will learn material. The more prior-knowledge they have, the more they will be able to learn. A recent paper by Witherby and Carpenter (2021) neatly summarized this effect in a set of experiments. They examined how prior knowledge of cooking and (American) football affected people’s ability to learn new information about cooking and football (2).
The Experiment(s)
In two experiments, participants were given a pre-test to assess their prior knowledge of cooking and football. They were then given a series of trivia questions about cooking and football that asked about new information. After entering their response they got feedback about the right answer. How did they make sure that people were presented with new information that they had no prior knowledge of? Easy. They made up false facts! For example, participants were asked In a kitchen, a claster is a type of what? After typing their response, they learned (incorrectly) that a claster is a type of knife. After each item participants were asked how certain they were that they could remember the answer on a scale from 0 to 100. Finally, they took a test over all of the new information they just learned.
Image from Pixabay
The Results
A regression analysis showed that prior knowledge predicted final test performance for new items, but only in the domain that they had prior knowledge for. People who came into the experiment with a stronger background in cooking learned more “new” facts about cooking, but not football. Similarly, people with a stronger background in football learned more “new” facts about football, but not cooking. Moreover, prior knowledge affected how people rated their ability to remember information. Cooking prior knowledge predicted how people rated their ability to remember facts about cooking, but not football, and vice versa.
Experiment 3
In a follow-up experiment, the researchers looked at how curiosity might be affected by prior knowledge. Using the same procedure described above, participants were asked to make a curiosity judgement after answering the question, but before learning the answer. So, after being asking In a kitchen, a claster is a type of what? Participants were asked, “How curious are you to know the answer to this question?” and given a scale from 1 (not curious at all) to 6 (very curious). Again, researchers found that prior knowledge predicted curiosity within that domain, but not the other. People with higher football knowledge were more curious about new football information, but not new cooking information, and vice versa.
Did prior knowledge cause people to be more curious about new information, or does curiosity (or interest) lead to more knowledge? The authors note that: “… there is a chicken-egg problem in determining directionality. It is possible that prior knowledge about a topic leads to increased interest in that topic. Alternatively, interest in a topic may lead students to seek out information about that topic, increasing their knowledge.” (2, pg. 493).
The Bottom Line
This highlights one of the difficulties with determining why students do well (or do not do well) with certain material. Is it because they are more interested? More motivated? More curious? Or is it because they happen to have the background knowledge to help them make enough sense of the material in order to become curious about it? The answer is likely a combination of all those factors where prior knowledge, interest, and curiosity reinforce each other, blurring the lines between them. What I take away from this, and what I tell my students, is that the more they learn the easier it will get. I don’t expect them to understand everything coming into the class (otherwise what would be the point in taking the class??), but I hope that by the end of the class they will be a little bit more curious.
References
Nyman, L. (2005), An interview with Kenneth B Clark teacher, psychologist, and fighter for justice. Encounter, 18(2), 5-8.
Witherby, A. E., & Carpenter, S. K. (2021). The rich-get-richer effect: Prior Knowledge predicts new learning of domain-relevant information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 48(4), 483-498. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000996
