The Assessment and Characterization of Young Learners’ Knowledge of a Topic in History

Current research on learners’ background knowledge has demonstrated how variations in the extent and quality of that knowledge affect learning. This paper focuses on the background knowledge that young learners bring to their study of history by characterizing students’ knowledge of events leading to the American Revolution just before and a year after they study the topic in school. The characterization of student knowledge is based on patterns of responses to interviews and on the construction of semantic nets that illustrate patterns of individual students. Results suggest that knowledge of students both before and after instruction is characterized by simple associations and a lack of connected structures.