A central and consistent finding from research is that what students already know and how that knowledge is organized affects both the content and the processes of additional learning. College students come to their course work with great variability in the amount of content-specific prior knowledge as well as effective strategies for learning and integrating new concepts.
College students spend a significant amount of time reading texts.
We, as instructors, often assume that students are able to integrate this new material with their prior knowledge in an accurate and efficient manner. However, this is not always the case. These students see course materials as a vehicle for integrating old ideas with new knowledge. They not only learned the main ideas in the text but were able to verbalize where course materials conflicted with their existing knowledge. They were willing to revise old understandings to incorporate the new.