Prior Research

Hirsch (2002) points out in the introduction to his Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: Everything an American Needs to Know, “People who already know a lot, tend to learn new things faster and more easily than people who do not know very much” (p. xii). This virtually self-evident maxim is at the heart of another goal of The Wiz Quiz, namely, to maintain and perhaps improve reading and listening comprehension by refreshing participants’ memory of information likely to aid in the comprehension of new spoken and written ideas.

For example, when a political commentator observes that U.S. Senators willing to seek compromise are going the way of the dodo, successful comprehension requires listeners to apply their knowledge of the flightless bird that became extinct in the 17th century, and which has become a metaphor for endangered species. Akin to this, a historian may assert that the rebuilding effort post-Katrina represented the largest recovery investment south of the Mason-Dixon line since Reconstruction. In order to understand this statement, readers must activate their knowledge of the 2005 hurricane, the geographic boundary between the North and South, and the recovery effort that followed the Civil War.

The Wiz Quiz is designed to help participants with reading and listening comprehension by refreshing or introducing the array of broadly shared background knowledge that is often referred to in society, and which The Wiz Quiz participants can relate to newly encountered ideas. A methodical sifting process led by Hirsch, Kett, and Trefil (2002) has identified those topics that constitute a reasonable compendium of the broadly shared background knowledge that is often assumed in American society by speakers and writers, and that is most usefully deployed by readers and listeners as anchors for information that they read and hear.

Activity Design Features

Many of The Wiz Quiz questions focus on the topics singled out by Hirsch et al. By improving the accessibility of these anchor topics in long term memory, participation in The Wiz Quiz has the potential to facilitate learning of newly encountered information, because the new ideas can more readily be linked to ideas that are known already.

Findings of The Wiz Quiz Evaluations

One hundred percent of the evaluation respondents indicated that they learn something new at sessions of The Wiz Quiz. One hundred percent also agreed that the atmosphere of the sessions is friendly and sociable, the kind of setting that is conducive to learning.