February 24, 2025

The *&%$!#! Baseball Study

Why Are Fans of Fact-Focused Teaching Still Citing a Small, Unconvincing Experiment from the ’80s?

By Alfie Kohn

Traditional education has more often been practiced by default than explicitly defended. For the last few years, however, we have witnessed a defensive, defiant embrace of instructional strategies that turn back the clock, notably a focus on transmitting chunks of information to students — and doing so through direct instruction.

The case for what might be called a “bunch o’ facts” approach comes in different shadings, from a simple declaration that knowledge matters to a range of stronger, more specific claims: that the acquisition of factual knowledge is more important than other intellectual proficiencies, or that it assists with acquiring them, or that it must come first.

Now, obviously, in order to think one must think about something. And I don’t know anyone, including progressive educators, who believes it’s undesirable to know things. But for schools to focus most of their efforts on filling students with knowledge (much of which will soon be forgotten) is likely to come at the expense of other goals, such as helping students to think deeply and critically and to develop a genuine passion for playing with ideas.

No wonder, then, that this agenda has to be dressed up with pretentious labels like “core knowledge” or a “content-rich” curriculum — and sometimes, as with phonics-intensive reading instruction, is wrapped in the misleading mantle of the “science of learning.“

I’m currently at work on a comprehensive critique of this content-based approach to education. While reviewing the claims made in its behalf, I noticed that proponents keep mentioning one particular experiment as evidence for what they assert is the overriding importance of background knowledge. Conducted nearly 40 years by a graduate student named Donna Recht (and coauthored by Lauren Leslie), it’s come to be known as the “baseball study,” and to this day it’s cited prominently, even triumphantly, by virtually all the leading partisans and popularizers of this point of view.¹

The rather unsurprising finding of this load-bearing piece of research: Middle schoolers fared better when reading a story about baseball if they already knew a fair amount about the game. But if you take the time to actually read the study, the first thing you notice — apart from the fact that it was restricted to a single topic with a very distinctive vocabulary — is how small the sample size was. Students were divided into four groups depending on whether they had high or low scores on an earlier reading test and whether they knew a lot or a little about baseball. There were only sixteen kids in each category.

Second, even though it’s frequently invoked to justify knowledge-based instruction, the study didn’t find that such teaching was superior to teaching focused on other goals. In fact, it didn’t evaluate different kinds of teaching at all. It just looked at students’ prior reading scores and the knowledge of the topic in question they already had. Might instruction in general reading skills have proved more useful than familiarizing students with specific content (in this case, about baseball)? The study provides no evidence one way or the other. (Other research, however, suggests that general reading skills can be enormously helpful.)²

Third, the main dependent variable in the study, the yardstick for judging success, was the number of facts in a passage they were given to read that kids were able to spit back on a test, along with the ability to figure out which facts likely mattered most to the adults. Is that impressive? Well, it is to someone who places a premium on the ability to remember a bunch of facts. The study’s title was “Effect of Prior Knowledge on Good and Poor Readers’ Memory of Text” (my emphasis). But is the capacity to recall facts — rather than, say, to think critically — what really counts? If you don’t already share that value judgment, you’re not going to find much of interest here.

So, sure, as the late Grant Wiggins conceded after shaking his head over all the fuss made about this little study, maybe “seemingly ‘weak’ readers can look good when the reading is on something they really know and love, compared with ‘stronger’ readers who don’t know a thing – in [this] case, [about] baseball. But it’s a huge stretch to go from that example to the conclusion that background knowledge explains reading ability” — let alone the conclusion that background knowledge is more important than reading ability.

Notice Wiggins’s use of the word love. It’s entirely possible — in fact, quite likely in light of other research — that what contributed to the superior recall demonstrated by certain students wasn’t so much that they knew more about baseball but that they enjoyed reading about it. (Of course these two are related: Enjoyment may have prompted them to learn more about the topic. But no attempt was made to disentangle those variables.) If reading proficiency is largely driven by enjoyment or motivation — and there’s good reason to think that it is³ — then the whole ideological edifice resting on this narrowly focused, small-scale, long-ago doctoral dissertation — the claim that teaching facts is the surest way to help students become better readers — is in danger of collapsing entirely.

Let’s sum up. Even if all we cared about was how many details kids managed to recall from something they were assigned to read, the baseball study doesn’t prove that teaching facts makes more sense than other kinds of instruction (or is more decisive than other variables). And, as reading expert Timothy Shanahan observes, it certainly doesn’t support the stronger claim that “readers can’t understand texts unless they have a lot of background knowledge.” If that were true, “we could never negotiate cultural boundaries or go beyond our very limited life experiences.” Some knowledge of the topic in question may help you to make sense of what you read, but that doesn’t mean that “increases in knowledge will lead to general improvements in reading comprehension,” he adds elsewhere.

And, again, what really matters here? Getting kids to unpack or remember a specific text is a very different goal from helping them to become “successful independent readers” over time. Moreover, knowing more stuff has a very limited role to play in helping students to read more proficiently, or think more clearly, or solve problems better.

And those outcomes are, if you’ll excuse the expression, the whole ball game.

 

NOTES

1. The two leading proponents of this perspective, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. and Daniel Willingham, cite the study repeatedly in their books and essays, as does a sympathetic journalist named Natalie Wexler (in her book The Knowledge Gap). It gets its own page on the Core Knowledge website, while another traditionalist site refers to it as “seminal.”

2. Interestingly, some of the people who tout this study also insist that reading tests basically just measure background knowledge. Hirsch, for example, decries “the pretense that formal reading skills are being tested when in fact relevant background knowledge is being tested” (The Knowledge Deficit, p. 98). But wouldn’t that mean that the baseball study was actually comparing different kinds of knowledge rather than comparing knowledge to reading skills? If so, that would seem to undermine the central claim about its finding. On the other hand, if the study was able to measure reading skills independent of knowledge, then it’s absurd to argue, as Hirsch does, that “there are no such thing[s] as ‘general’ reading and thinking skills.” In reality, reading and thinking skills, as distinct from that which is being read and thought about, often can be taught directly. To try to deny this, as P David Pearson, an expert in the field, explained, is “to reject a huge body of research over the last thirty years showing that skills — strategies for reading more effectively — do have a measurable and persistent effect” (personal communication, April 23, 2021; see also Linda G. Fielding and P David Pearson, “Reading Comprehension: What Works,” Educational Leadership, February 1994: 62-68). Plenty of programs successfully help students to acquire thinking skills that can be applied across multiple domains. See, for example, Peter Ellerton, “On Critical Thinking and Content Knowledge: A Critique of the Assumptions of Cognitive Load Theory,” Thinking Skills and Creativity 43 (March 2022).

3. In one study, how interested the students were in a given passage was thirty times more important than how “readable” the passage was (Richard C. Anderson et al., “Interestingness of Children’s Reading Material,” in Aptitude, Learning, and Instruction, vol. 3: Conative and Affective Process Analyses, ed. Richard E. Snow and Marshall J. Farr [Erlbaum, 1987]). In another study, fourth graders’ comprehension turned out to be so much higher when the passages they were assigned dealt with topics that interested them — suddenly, the kids were testing well above their supposed reading level — that the researchers ended their report by asking why their colleagues are so “concern[ed] with difficulty when interest is so obviously a factor in comprehension” (Thomas H. Estes and Joseph L. Vaughan, Jr., “Reading Interest and Comprehension: Implications,” The Reading Teacher 27 (1973), p. 152.). Perhaps we can substitute “prior knowledge” for “difficulty” in that sentence.

To be notified whenever a new article or blog is posted on this site, please enter your e-mail address at www.alfiekohn.org/sign-up .