Schema

The Concept and Its Application

Schema as a concept was first introduced into psychology by the British psychologist Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969) through his learning theory. Bartlett perceived organized knowledge as an elaborate network of abstract mental structures that represent our understanding of the world. Bartlett's main studies concentrate on the impact of our cultural background in rephrasing and memorizing certain events. For example, in one of his most well-known studies, Bartlett examined whether subjects could recall events that strongly deviate from their own environmental background, and he showed that the more culturally deviated one's own background was from that of the presented story, the less likely it was that participants could remember the story. Bartlett concluded that the participants distort the presented story in favor of their own cultural stereotypes, and details that were difficult to interpret were omitted because they did not fit in with the participants' own schemata.

In general, the learner in schema theory actively builds schemata and revises them in light of new information. Here, it is important to mention that each schema is unique and depends on an individual's experiences and cognitive processes. [Page 2363]David Ausubel (1968), in his meaningful learning theory, argues that there exists a hierarchical organization of knowledge where new information will be added to the already existing hierarchy. In contrast, Jean Piaget shows that there is more than one body of knowledge available to learners. Piaget claims that there exists a network of context-specific bodies of knowledge and according to specific situations we apply a specific body of knowledge. Piaget's definition of schema is useful for interpreting information in which situation-specific schemata are useful in distinguishing between two types of categories of interpretation of knowledge: the expert and the novice. Experts are more complex and developed schemata that function better in any given domain, and the novice has no schema or inadequate schema to help interpret new information. Since schemata are perceived as context specific, they depend on the individual's experience with the subject.

Beside interpreting information, the literature also suggests that schemata are crucial for decoding how that information is presented to oneself. One possibility is reflection in text structure. This means that readers use their systematic representation of text to help them interpret the text. Also, as Robert Kaplan (1966) points out, it is important to note that an essay style is culturally determined.

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