Hello! Continuing my focus on memory this month, I want to build on what I said last time about activating schemas, and think about starter tasks, too.
Consider the following statement:
“Starter tasks serve to prepare learners for the coming task by refreshing their memories and activating relevant schemas.”
But… is there a difference between refreshing students’ memories (reminding them of prior knowledge) and activating a schema?
Actually, yes!
This connects to what schemas are and how they work.
In Brief
The concept of schemas (or schemata) was introduced to psychology by Piaget, though it’s Frederick Bartlett’s work that most influences theories of long-term memory.
A schema can be seen as a concept or category, and therefore differs from knowing a fact in that it features relationships among knowledge (Anderson et al., 2001). But even that doesn’t quite cover it; as emphasised by developmental psychology, schemas can also contain actions, perceptions and emotions. Your schema for a horror movie, for example, may conjure up particular images and feelings!
As the above example suggests, schemas are also individual, and because of this, they vary according to culture. A child’s idea of a party, for example, is different from that of a university student, while a schema for a wedding will vary from one culture to another.
Key Implications
A key implication is that activating the schema is not just retrieving one memory, but activating a whole system.
In vision, this relates to a perceptual set which can cause you to see an ambiguous figure or illusion one way or another. In social behaviour, it could be your mental script for how to act at a dinner party.
When it comes to memory, one fact is linked to others in a schema, at least when someone’s knowledge is well structured. Activating a schema via your starter task makes all of these connected ideas more accessible to the learner. For example, you might use one example or image to remind a class of a procedure, a type of problem and solution, a conceptual idea such as ‘revolution’, etc. It’s like switching on one light, and a whole network of lights goes on.
That’s very different from retrieving just one word or fact, unconnected to a broader understanding.
What Schemas Are Not
There are widespread misconceptions about schemas. One that I’ve often seen is the idea that schemas are the result of a chunking process in working memory; that we can neatly package new ideas into groups, and that those then become new schemas. I have seen this as advice for students and teachers.
But that’s not at all how it works.
In fact, the opposite is true – chunking in working memory is only possible because we already have long-term memories structured into schemas. You can only chunk based on what you already know. Miller explains this in his classic 1956 paper on ‘the magic number 7’, in which he talks of ‘chunks’ and ‘recoding’ and notes that any errors that result can derive from a person’s “whole life history” (Miller, 1956, p. 95).
Linked to this, Bartlett showed that as well as helping, schemas can also distort memory, with people misremembering things according to their cultural expectations.
While activating a schema is generally a good idea, remember that we can activate misconceptions, too!
Next week, I’ll explore the implications beyond starter tasks.
Jonathan
Last week: Evidence-Based Techniques and Understanding
Links to my new book, What Teachers Need to Know About Memory:
Amazon UK | Amazon US | Booktopia ANZ | Preview on SAGE site.
(oh… 🌏 now with up to 20% off in the Aus/NZ region, or use UK23AUTHOR code in the UK… I’ll keep trying to get more!)
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