For decades, a lack of progress in lifting education outcomes and addressing equity gaps has persisted across the English-speaking world. There have been many scapegoats, such as lazy teachers, shoddy facilities, and lack of accountability. But education writer Natalie Wexler identifies an alternative explanation. She points to the “knowledge gap” as the chief culprit.
Wexler argues that too much time in school is spent on honing decontextualised ‘skills’ — especially reading comprehension skills, such as trying to “find the meaning of a text”— and not enough time on building actual knowledge through the texts that children are reading. It’s this knowledge-building, she argues, that allows students to make sense of what they read and to facilitate learning more broadly. To enable children to become better readers, schools should dedicate less time to reading comprehension ‘skills’ and instead focus more on building knowledge — including across subjects like science and social studies — earlier and more often than they typically do. That’s particularly crucial for children from families with less education, who are unlikely to pick up academic knowledge outside school. The more students know, the more text they will be able to read and make sense of, enabling them to acquire yet more knowledge.
Around the world, and even in the major Australian states of NSW and Victoria, curriculum reform is being described as “knowledge-rich” in an effort to redress a dominant ‘skills-focused’ approach across education systems. How does the research evidence from cognitive science inform a knowledge-building approach in education? What are the innovative ways that schools and systems are focusing on knowledge-rich curriculum? How can addressing the knowledge gap improve Australia’s education outcomes?
