Schema Theory

Def. Schema theory is a theoretical view of knowledge construction that says that the information people store in memory consists of networks of organized and interconnected ideas, relationships, and procedures.

The interconnected ideas, relationships, and procedures are called schemata (singular form is schema.

Begins with philosophy Kant who described the mind as actively using existing knowledge to guide perception and categorize information.

Psychologist F.C. Bartlett wrote in the 30's did some interesting research on the processes involved in remembering information from written pasages. He found that subjects remembered different parts of stories and that they interpreted them stories based on their own frames of reference changing the facts to make them fit. Over time, distortions of the stories increased but were invariably linked to the way that information was meaningful to the subjects. He concluded that people have a strong drive to make sense of what they encounter.

Students enter a class with widely varying beliefs, attitudes, and background knowledge and bring diversa schemata. They can read the same material and interpret it quite differently.

So, schemata have 3 major characteristics:

1. Each schema contains material determined by the person's past experiences.

2. Each schema is embedded in other larger schmata and has other schemata embedded with it, such as schemata for learning in school is embedded in larger schemata for learning in general. The embeddedness allows us to link schemata together to make sense of the world.

3. Schemata are active. They are constantly being evaluated based on their ability to explain how the world works. When they make sense, they don't need to change; when they don't we are motivated to adjust them.

David Ausubel, a psychologist wrote a book in 1963 stressing the important of cognitive structures on learning.

His def. of meaningful verbal learning is as follows:

Meaningful verbal learning is the acquisition of ideas that are linked to other ideas.

This is in contract to rote learning, which emphasizes the memorization of specific items of information rather than exploring relationships within the material.

Meaningful learning occurs when the ideas in a new schema are connected not only to each other but to previously established schemata as well.

One of the most prominent ideas from Ausubel's work is the concept of advance organizers.

Advance organizers are verbal statements at the beginning of a lesson that preview and structure the new material and link it to the students' existing schemata.

Advance organizers act like road maps. Effective advance organizers:

• are presented prior to learning a larger body of information

• are written in paragraph form

• are written in concrete fashion

• are designed to include an example that helps learners identify the relationship between the ideas in the organizer and the information to follow.

An example from a lesson introducing the research process:

Research is a creative process involving time for reflection and gestation. It is iterative; what you learn as you proceed may cause you to go back and rethink what you did earlier.

The first stage in research is to pick a topic and to use that topic to explore the literature on a very broad scale in preliminary fashion (the second stage). What you learn as you explore the topic allows you to move to the third stage of focus formulation. Once you have a focused topic you can search the literature more specifically for relevant and useful material (the 4th stage). The knowledge you gain from the your reading of the literature (the 5^th stage) allows you to put it into a useful form to present to others (the 6^th and final stage).

In our class today we will explicate this model in more detail and focus on the first two stages; our next class will emphasize the 3^rd and 4^th stages. You will do the final stages in your subject class with your teacher.

As you see from the example, the advance organizer provides a framework for new content and prepares the student for what will follow. The exact form an advance organizer takes depends on:

• the type of content
• the age of the learner
• how familiar the students are with the learning material.

Active Learner Involvement

The third principle that increases the effectiveness of the Lecture-Discussion Model is involvement of students through teacher questioning.

Lectures are popular because:

• They are economical in terms of planning; energy can be devoted to organizing the content.

• They are flexible and can be applied to most, if not all, content areas.

• They are relatively simple to implement.

But they have two problems:

• They promote passive learning, encouraging students to merely listen and absorb information, but not necessarily to interrelate ideas. They encourage dependence on the teacher.

• They do not allow teachers to assess student's understanding or learning progress.

McKeachie reports on the research literature on the ineffectiveness of lecture as a teaching method. In seven studies comparing lecture to discussion, discussion was superior in all seven on measures of retention and higher-order thinking. It was also superior in almost all cases on measures of student attitude and motivation.

The steps in planning a lecture-discussion lesson are as follows:

1. The teacher first considers goals.

2. The teacher considers what students already know.
   • by pretest
   • by listing, grouping, labeling ideas relating to a concept
   • by defining terms and explaining relationships between the terms
   • by reviewing their backgrounds

3. The teacher then structures content to make it meaningful to the students
   • by using hierarchies to show relationships
   • by using generalizations which are then broken down into narrower topics
   • by using an extended analogy
   • by using outlines, models, graphs, maps, and matrices
   • by combining several forms of structure

4. The teacher prepares an advance organizer

5. The teacher implements the lesson in 5 steps:
   1. Introduction
      • Introductory focus - to draw students into the lesson. Some types of intructory focus:
        • Discrepant (counterintuitive)
        • Personalization
        • Examples (colorful, dramatic)
        • Demonstration

      • Stating the lesson objectives - to identify important learning goals

      • Overview - to provide an overlview of the topic and how how major concepts are interrelated.

   2. Presentation (short -- 10-15 minutes)
      • Uses advance organizer and structure as reference points
      • Describes content, divides it into component parts
      • Describes each component part in turn
      • Links all the parts to the starting structure and advance organizer

   3. Comprehension Monitoring (informal assessment of student understanding)
      • Periodically intersperse questions within presentation directed to specific students asking for conclusions, examples, restatements in own words.

   4. Integration (linking new information to prior learning and linking different parts of the new learning to each other)
      • use questions to encourage vertical integration through linking superordinate with subordinate concepts
      • use questions to encourage horizontal integation by describing similarities and differences among coordinate ideas (how different ideas relate to each other)

   5. Review and Closure
      • summarizes the topic
      • emphasizes important points
      • provides a link to new learning