For students with disabilities and diverse learning needs, priming background knowledge is critical to success because it addresses the memory and strategy deficits they bring to certain tasks. In effect, priming is a brief reminder or prompt that alerts the learner to task dimensions or to retrieve known information.
Instructional materials can acknowledge the importance of background knowledge in two ways.
First, students can be pretested for important background knowledge. Such tests can be used to determine placement within an instructional program or to alert teachers to the need for allocating time to background topics. It is often useful to assess the background knowledge of students with learning difficulties using formats other than reading and writing because these students frequently understand more than they can express through reading or writing. Second, instructional programs can include important background knowledge in the scope of topics taught. Ideally, such background topics would be taught or reviewed a few days before the introduction of new strategies that depend upon those topics.