Schema
Describes an organized pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them.
Piaget described schema as a method of dealing with the environment that can be generalized to many situations. Schemata are simply ways of dealing with the world. How we come to know and understand the environment changes as cognitive abilities develop. As children get older, the schemata they employ become more complex.
Piaget viewed intellectual growth as a process of adaptation (adjustment) to the world. This happens through:
- Assimilation: Which is using an existing schema to deal with a new object or situation.
- Accommodation: This happens when the existing schema (knowledge) does not work, and needs to be changed to deal with a new object or situation.
Schema are important for understanding learning and constructivism.
Excerpted from Hemphill (1999). The Blues and the Scientific Method: Codified Cultural Schemas and Understanding Adult Cognition from a Multicultural Perspective:
"Schemas are vehicles for comprehension, storage, and recall of information. They are associative structures in declarative memory; network structures that store general knowledge about objects, events, and structures. A schema can be thought of as an abstracted pattern onto which information can be organized; as a set of rules or strategies for imposing order on experience. A schema is best seen as being at the same time both structure and process-a set of rules. In perception, schemas have an assimilation function: they work to recognize and process input. In memory, they provide organization for the storage of memories, and they may reorganize these memories in the face of new information or changing goals. In recall, schemas provide the rules of arranging memories, and for determining the "what must have been" for any gaps they detect. When we learn something new that we interpret as related to pre-existing schemas, we integrate the new knowledge into those pre-existing schemas. Schemas are thought to be primarily unconscious, but in some cases they may be evident to the conscious mind (Bruer, 1994; Minsky, 1975; Rice, 1980; Rumelhart, Hinton, & Williams, 1976)."
The concept of schema is closely associated with the idea of mental models.