The Baseball Study, also called the Baseball Experiment, was a 1987 academic study by education researchers Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie that tested how prior knowledge affects reading comprehension. Working with 64 seventh and eighth grade students at Marquette University in Milwaukee, the two researchers tested participants on a passage about baseball and evaluated the results against both the students' reading ability and their existing knowledge of the sport. They concluded that a student's prior knowledge of the subject mattered just as much as general reading proficiency for comprehending a written text, a finding widely cited as a demonstration of how background knowledge shapes comprehension.
Facts
Core ClaimThe Baseball Study concluded that a reader's prior topic knowledge predicts reading comprehension as strongly as general reading ability, since students with high reading ability but low baseball knowledge recalled and summarized a baseball passage no better than students with low reading ability and low baseball knowledge. 1 Classification
Education LevelLower Secondary Education (ISCED 2) 1 Sources
1. Baseball Study (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia FoundationDesign and implementation section, opening sentence
In 1987, researchers Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie developed a study to determine how much reading comprehension depended on prior knowledge of a topic.
Design and implementation section, researchers' quoted finding
Students with high reading ability but low knowledge of baseball were no more capable of recall or summarization than were students with low reading ability and low knowledge of baseball.
Wikipedia lead, education-level classification
In 1987, education researchers Donna Recht and Lauren Leslie tested middle school students on the topic of baseball, evaluating their results based on the participant's reading abilities and prior knowledge of baseball.
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