Writing a Teaching Article for Readers at Different Levels: Prior Knowledge, Expertise Reversal, Text Cohesion, and Prerequisite Notes
People who know more beforehand still know more afterward (correlation .53), but the average correlation with how much they learn this time is close to zero, and individual studies range from strongly negative to strongly positive. High-assistance materials help learners with low prior knowledge (d = 0.51) and hurt those with high prior knowledge (d = −0.43); high and low are relative splits within each study. Stating prerequisites at the top is industry practice; whether readers can use it to decide if a post is for them has not been tested.