Honoring Students’ Prior Knowledge and Experience

When students enter your class, they bring with them a variety of experiences, perspectives, and knowledge related to the course topic. Though every student will engage with the same course information, it’s important to celebrate the knowledge and skills that students bring with them and to encourage them to draw from past experiences to flourish in the learning environment. There is no right or better experience to bring to class; rather, each student’s background facilitates their unique connection to the course topic. In fact, educational research reveals that activating prior knowledge is a key component of facilitating learning. Drawing on a student’s prior knowledge and experience can help them personally connect to the material, which can boost motivation and retention.  

Students will absorb course content through the lens of their experiences in prior courses and in life. This offers an excellent opportunity to engage them, as emotional connections to course material help motivate students to learn. Finding course content or topics personally relevant helps students make connections to the topic and retain new information. In this sense, activating students’ prior knowledge can support them in taking in new information. 

Here are some ways to honor students’ prior knowledge and experiences in your course and help students use that knowledge and experience to enhance their learning. 

Gauge the Extent and Nature of Students’ Prior Knowledge

You can learn the range of perspectives and experiences students bring with them through an early semester activity, such as a pre-semester survey. One benefit of a pre-semester survey or one done the first week of class is that it can help to identify the knowledge that students are bringing with them. This type of survey can be conducted using Qualtrics, an online survey platform that is free for the AU community. Such a survey can reveal how students possess different relationships to the course topic, which you may ask them to draw on for assignments or discussions or explore together as a class. You might ask:  

  • What is their familiarity with core concepts and themes?  
  • Have they taken a class (or classes) on this topic in the past?  
  • Have they studied or do they know something about the theories you will cover?  
  • Do they have personal experience related to the course topic which they feel is appropriate and relevant to share? 

Other strategies to gauge prior knowledge include brainstorming discussions or small group exercises that yield a sense of where students are in their thinking. These strategies can provide a general impression of what your students already know about course content.   

Activate Students’ Prior Knowledge

Help students make connections to the material! Prior knowledge can offer a ‘hook’ onto which students can grasp, allowing them to integrate new information into the understandings (or “schema”) they already have. Research on the science of learning demonstrates that new knowledge “sticks” better when it has prior knowledge to stick to. Ideally, as we introduce students to new material, they create links between previously acquired and new knowledge that help them build increasingly more complex knowledge structures. However, students may not make those connections on their own. When prior knowledge is activated, sufficient, appropriate, and accurate, it supports learning. When prior knowledge is inactive, insufficient, inappropriate or inaccurate it hinders learning.   

Some ways to activate prior knowledge are to begin a lesson or unit with a warmup question, exploration activity, or an interesting example to build relevance. Ask students what they know and/or want to know about the topic. As you proceed through the semester, highlight connections and links between content and topics. Also, since students often compartmentalize knowledge by course, professor, or discipline, it is important that you explicitly link new material to knowledge from previous courses.  

Adopt a growth mindset

A student’s prior exposure to a course topic does not determine their learning or success in a current course. A growth mindset suggests that any student can grow and improve if they continue practicing and incorporating feedback, rather than coming into a course with a predetermined likelihood for success. When students adopt a growth mindset and believe they can succeed, they are more willing to try new experiences.  

You can help cultivate a growth mindset among students by modeling it yourself. You may tell students about how you used to struggle with a task or problem, and how you kept trying and eventually reached your goal. You can also incorporate formative assessment into assignments, such as turning in drafts of assignments for feedback ahead of a final due date or allowing students to turn an assignment in a second time with corrections or updates. In so doing, you show students that they can develop a skill over time, and that mistakes are expected. 

A resource from Grand Canyon University offers an example of drawing on student strengths in mathematics, a discipline which is often associated with a fixed mindset (a person thinks they are predisposed to be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at math). Rather than beginning a lesson with a presentation of algorithms, which may give students the impression that there is a “correct” way to solve a problem, an instructor might start a lesson by sharing open-ended problems with students and asking them to share their strategies. 

Practice transparency

Many academic practices remain unspoken in higher education classrooms. For example, you might ask students to participate productively in class. But what does this mean? Should students raise their hands to contribute, or just speak up? Are students supposed to ask questions, or posit new arguments? An expectation like productive participation will differ slightly for every class, and since every student will come from a different educational context, they will all have a different preconception of what participation should be. Eliminate any confusion by practicing transparency. One helpful resource for developing transparent assessments are the transparent assignment templates offered by the Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) project. When outlining an assignment or responsibility (such as participation), TILT encourages sharing such details as: 

  • Connection of the assignment to course goals 
  • What students are supposed to learn or practice from the assignment 
  • The qualities or components of a successful submission or performance 
  • The disciplinary-specific skills being practiced 
  • How students might prepare and/or debrief the assignment 

These details allow students to understand what is expected of them and why, which can motivate better performance and engagement. Transparent expectations also ensure that every student is working with the same information about the assignment, rather than assuming that all students already know those expectations.  

Encourage students to draw from their experiences

You may highlight students’ personal relationship to the course content as a strength. As part of an assignment or discussion, consider asking students to examine how they feel about the topic and why, or what school of thought or argument with which they align themselves. Incorporating their own experiences and knowledge into assignments can help students define their own perspectives and deter the temptation to plagiarize those of others.  However, it’s important not to require them to share more than they are comfortable sharing. Transparency is helpful here: clarify for students why you are asking them to share their perspective, and how they can do it effectively.  

Instructors may also offer students more than one way to complete an assignment and demonstrate their learning. For example, students may answer a prompt with a short essay or a short video or audio recording, and you can encourage students to select the option that best fits their strengths. Additionally, offering alternatives or options for assignments is a crucial component of Universal Design for Learning.  

Be careful not to assume student experience

Using analogies and examples that connect to students’ everyday knowledge helps to make the material more understandable. However, it’s important not to generalize and assume students share experiences with each other, or you.   

You may inadvertently group yourself and your students together by using the language of “we” or “us.” You may also refer to the students as a whole using “you” or “you all.” For example, you may frame yourself and your students as outsiders to an experience discussed in class – “we may not have experienced homelessness, but we can sympathize with those that have” – or you may make a false generalization about your students’ knowledge – “you all are familiar with new technology.” Making generalized assumptions about student experiences obscures differences in their relationships with the material and limits your ability as an instructor to provide effective learning experiences.  

You can also ask students not to generalize or assume a common experience among those present. Any experience that your class discusses might have personally affected someone who is present, and that discussing the topic in a detached way could feel voyeuristic or alienating to that person. You could say something like, “During this discussion, I want everyone to remember that this topic/issue/experience has effected many people, which may include some people who are present.” It can be helpful to remind students, and yourself, to speak about an issue as though someone who has been impacted by it is in the room, since it’s likely they are! 

References

Ambrose et al. (2010). How Learning Works: 7 Research –Based principles for Smart Teaching   

Ambrose, S. A., & Lovett, M. C. (2014). Prior knowledge is more important than content: Skills and beliefs also impact learning. In V. A. Benassi, C. E. Overson, & C. M. Hakala (Eds.). Applying science of learning in education: Infusing psychological science into the curriculum. Retrieved from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology web site: http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/asle2014/index.php  

Kroeper, K. M., Fried, A. C., & Murphy, M. C. (2022). Towards fostering growth mindset classrooms: Identifying teaching behaviors that signal instructors’ fixed and growth mindsets beliefs to students. Social Psychology of Education: An International Journal, 25(2-3), 371-398. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-022-09689-4  

Winkelmes, M. “Transparency in Learning and Teaching.”  TILT Higher Ed Examples and Resources, 2014.