Understanding Student's Prior Knowledge

In the article "Prior knowledge is more than content: Skills and beliefs also impact learning", authors Susan Ambrose and Marsha Lovett, examine how teachers can determine the prior knowledge their students possess and how to effectively incorporate it into their teaching to promote student learning.
The four types of prior knowledge discussed in this article are content specific, intellectual skills, epistemological beliefs, and metacognition.  Strong and accurate content-specific prior knowledge can aid in a smoother acquisition of new information but when the foundation of this prior knowledge is weak or faulty,  new information is rejected because it does not connect with the prior and teachers must modify their instruction to correct misinformation. To assess content specific prior knowledge, teachers can administer diagnostics test, have students self-evaluate or look for patterns of error. Intellectual skills are what students need to be able to digest, express, apply and demonstrate the knowledge that has been taught to them and any form of assessment given can be affected if intellectual skills have not been taught. Epistemological beliefs are a student's views on learning stemming from their perceived capacities, experiences and notations of the world, which can have a bigger impact on students behavior than their actual capability. Teachers should be taking these perceptions on learning into consideration and plan to combat the negative beliefs that impact behavior and hinder learning.  Metacognition is also a crucial process that allows students to reflect, assess and plan on their own understanding of the content material. It allows students to take control of their own learning not only in grade school but prepares them to college and beyond.

Main point is that "(1) Prior knowledge plays a critical role in learning, which means that (2) faculty members need to assess the content, beliefs and skills students bring with them into courses and (3) use that information as both a foundation for new learning as well as an opportunity to intervene when content knowledge is inaccurate or insufficient; skills are not adequately developed; and beliefs are interfering with productive learning behaviors." (pg. 16)

The part of the article that really stuck out to me was how "Many believe that learners’ beliefs about their capabilities – often preconscious and often inaccurate– can be more important drivers of behavior than their actual capability (pg. 13). This made me reflect on a student that I have that has a hard time staying on task during independent work. The student often gets stuck early on in the work and instead of asking for help, the student goes on to distract other students. I have tried to combat this by frequently checking in with this student during independent work while we work on getting him more comfortable to ask for help. Outside of independent work, I have also tried to give the student discrete positive affirmations about himself to help build up his morale. When the student makes habituated negative comments about himself like "well, of course, I wouldn't understand that", I always try to immediately intervene on those as well. While it seems that this is a mindset that the student has already accepted about himself, I think that this would have been important information for myself, as well as future teachers that have him, to have known so that we could have worked on it since the beginning instead of waiting until the patterns brought up this concern.

Reference: 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 (pp. 7-19). Retrieved from http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/asle2014/index.php