Going beyond the lesson: Self-generating new factual knowledge in the classroom.

For children to build a knowledge base, they must integrate and extend knowledge acquired across separate episodes of new learning. Children's performance was assessed in a task requiring them to self-generate new factual knowledge from the integration of novel facts presented through separate lessons in the classroom. Whether self-generation performance predicted academic outcomes in reading comprehension and mathematics was also examined. The 278 participating children were in kindergarten through Grade 3 (mean age=7.7years, range=5.5-10.3). Children self-generated new factual knowledge through integration in the classroom; age-related increases were observed. Self-generation performance predicted both reading comprehension and mathematics academic outcomes, even when controlling for caregiver education.