Building Background Knowledge Through Wide Reading: A Five-Step Process

Teacher: We're now going to move to our next step, and that is [taking] all these lovely sticky notes that you all have gathered, all this information—we're now going to put it into a form that the rest of us can read and understand.

Robert Marzano: In Step 4, students write about and represent what they've read. Let me explain that. In some uses of what I'm going to call "sustained silent reading," students read and then they put the book away. They don't do anything with the information. For me, this fourth step is critical. They read, but then they have to write about it and represent it. They have to write—that's the linguistic part. And they have to represent—they draw pictures, pictographs—that's the nonlinguistic part. They process it in multiple modes, if you will. Unless that's done, a lot of what they've read might get lost.

Teacher: I'm going to be giving you a capture sheet. And a capture sheet—the top part of the capture sheet—is where you take your information and you record what you have learned about your topic. The second part that you're going to do is the questions, questions that you still have, because we've talked about how good readers are always formulating questions. The last part that you're going to do is going to be a symbolic representation of what you've learned. It could be an actual picture; it could be a symbol. It's another way for you to be able to express the information that you have learned, but this way it will be done in a graphic form.

Teacher: The more children have an opportunity to manipulate material, the more they're going to be able to keep material as their own.

Student 1: The second reason I like Persephone is I did a play on her.

Teacher: Good. Can you write all that on the capture sheet? So we have that?

Teacher: Working with that information from the sticky note to put it into paragraph or sentence form on a capture sheet, to take that information again, to transpose it into a nonlinguistic form...the more that you can involve students in the actual learning of it, the more the various activities that you can do become more alive for them.

Marzano: So, Step 4 is critical. They stop reading and now they do something with the content, both linguistically and nonlinguistically.

Nia, student: I learned that Persephone was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She also helped her mother grow things and harvest. Persephone is my favorite because pomegranates came from her.

Teacher: Nia, what does that picture make you think of? Why did you draw that picture?

Nia: I drew this because it makes me remember about the play I did at Annadale Terrace. And that's her mom and the garden...

Teacher: So it's making those bridges from ancient history to our current history here with these 5th graders, bridging that and making it important for them and making those connections. So that really helped them to be able to expand their background knowledge.

Student 3: I did the Olympics, and the Olympics were a way of honoring the gods. The Olympics were held every four years for Zeus. The winners of the Olympics brought fame to their hometown.

Marzano: It boils down to making sure that we provide a rich variety of experiences with that knowledge so they have an opportunity to learn it in a very deep way.

Teacher: Anything else that you want to add to that? Thank you very much.

Source: Source Note: From Building Background Knowledge Through Wide Reading: A Five-Step Process (DVD), 2006, Alexandria, VA: ASCD