Gina Cervetti speaks with Education Week about the use of knowledge-building curricula in ELA classrooms

Education Week reports that a growing number of school districts around the country are adopting “knowledge-building curricula,” ELA materials that are designed to grow students’ content knowledge about the world, often by integrating social studies and science topics. The programs stem from the research-backed idea that having a broad array of background knowledge makes individuals better readers.

Unlike other ELA curricula, which often give teachers choices of books or allow students to pick their own, knowledge-building programs feature tightly constructed sequences of text that are all thematically related.

“The idea of ELA being about something is a really good one,” Gina Cervetti tells Education Week. Cervetti, who studies the intersection of literacy and content-area learning, says content-knowledge curricula can help students think more deeply about big ideas, make connections across topics, and show their understanding through their writing.

However, what content is taught in knowledge-building programs, how teaching it should integrate comprehension strategy instruction, and how to approach this large shift in teaching practices are questions that researchers and educators don’t always agree on.

Education Week notes some research has shown that a couple commercially available knowledge-building programs have led to better general reading comprehension scores. But few programs that schools can purchase have gone through these independent tests, and as Cervetti put it, “there’s a great difference between a controlled efficacy trial and use in the real world.”