A schema is a mental structure that organizes what we know about a person, object, or event, built from past experience. Schemas let the brain interpret new information quickly by filling in expected details, but that same shortcut can distort what we remember. Psychologists have used the idea to explain how people misremember stories (Bartlett, 1932) and how children’s understanding of the world develops (Piaget, 1952).
Key Takeaways
- Definition: A schema is a knowledge structure that allows organisms to interpret and understand the world around them. Schemas organize information so the brain can work more efficiently.
- Piaget’s Influence: Piaget’s theory of cognitive development put schemas at the forefront of cognitive science, and the concept evolved further through the 1970s and 1980s.
- The Computer Analogy: The widespread use of computers in the late 20th century also shaped theories of how people store and use information in the brain.
- Four Types: There are four main types of schemas, centered around objects, the self, roles, and events.
- Assimilation and Accommodation: Schemas can be changed and reconstructed throughout a person’s life through two processes: assimilation and accommodation.
- Impact on Education: Schemas have been pivotal in shaping theories of learning as well as teacher instruction methods.
- Modern Neuroscience: Brain research links schemas to the medial prefrontal cortex, which speeds up how fast new, schema-consistent memories are consolidated (Tse et al., 2007).
Historical Background
Schema theory is a branch of cognitive science concerned with how the brain structures knowledge. Schema (plural: schemas or schemata) is an organized unit of knowledge for a subject or event based on past experience.
Individuals access schema to guide current understanding and action (Pankin, 2013). For example, a student’s self-schema of being intelligent might form after years of teachers praising their work. That praise then encourages genuinely studious habits.
Information that does not fit into the schema may be comprehended incorrectly or even not at all.
For example, a waiter might ask a customer if he would like to hum with his omelet. The customer would likely struggle to interpret the question. Humming is not something patrons typically do with omelets in a restaurant (Widmayer, 2001).
The concept of a schema can be traced to Plato and Aristotle (Marshall, 1995). Scholars consider Kant (1929) the first to describe schemas as organizing structures that people use to interpret the world (Johnson, 1987).
F.C. Bartlett was the first psychologist to study schemas in depth, in his 1932 book Remembering.
Bartlett argued that remembering is not a passive playback of stored information. It is an active, reconstructive process: we rebuild the past by fitting it to the schemas we already hold.
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, best known for his work on child development, was the first to create a cognitive development theory that included schemas.
Piaget (1976) saw schemas as mental structures altered by new information. In Piaget’s theory, new information can be added or assimilated into current schemas. These schemas are the ideas people have about how the world functions.
However, new information that cannot be integrated into an organism’s current schemas can create disequilibrium. When this happens, the schemas must change to accommodate the new information.
Key Study: The War of the Ghosts
Aim: Bartlett wanted to see whether memory for an unfamiliar story changes in a systematic, schema-driven way as it is retold. He wanted to rule out simple random fading.
Method: He gave English participants a North American folk tale called “The War of the Ghosts,” unfamiliar in its style, imagery, and supernatural content. Using serial reproduction, one participant’s retelling was passed on and reproduced by another, and so on for six or seven reproductions. This is similar to a game of Chinese whispers. He also used repeated reproduction, asking the same participants to recall the story again on several later occasions.
Results: With each retelling, the story grew shorter, shrinking from about 330 words to around 180 words as unfamiliar details dropped out. It also grew more coherent and more conventional: unfamiliar elements were changed into familiar ones, such as canoes becoming “boats.” Even so, the story still held together as a recognizable, if altered, whole.
Conclusion: Bartlett concluded that remembering is an active, reconstructive process rather than a passive readout of the past.
Participants were engaged in what he called “effort after meaning,” unconsciously editing the story to fit the schemas of their own culture.
Memory, Bartlett argued, is not a faithful recording but an “imaginative reconstruction” of the past.
Bartlett’s method has since been criticized as methodologically loose. He did not standardize his instructions, and his conclusions rested on a small, unrepresentative sample rather than systematic data. Even so, Hunter (1964) later replicated the same pattern of change using the same method.
Characteristics of Schemas
The theorists of the 1970s and 1980s conceptualized schemas as structures for representing broad concepts in memory (Ortony, 1977; McVee, Dunsmore, and Gavelek, 2005).
This definition highlights several important features of schemas, as noted by Rumelhart (1984):
- Schemas have variables,
- Schemas can be embedded, one within another,
- Schemas represent knowledge at all levels of abstraction,
- Schemas represent knowledge rather than definitions,
- Schemas are active processes,
- Schemas are recognition devices whose processing is aimed at evaluating how well new information fits into itself.
Examples of Schemas in Everyday Life
Piaget developed the notion of schemata, mental “structures,” which act as frameworks through which the individual classifies and interprets the world.
These schemas let us distinguish between horses and cows by looking for key characteristics.
A schema can be discrete and specific or sequential and elaborate. For example, a schema may be as specific as recognizing a dog or as elaborate as categorizing different types of dogs.
A parent reading to a child about dogs, for instance, helps the child construct a schema about dogs.
On a more sophisticated level, schemas help us interpret geographical features and complex mathematical formulae. They also guide our understanding of acceptable behavior in particular roles and contexts.
Piaget argued that schemata become more complex as we grow and mature. This growing complexity lets us understand and interpret the world in more sophisticated ways.
A baby, for instance, has only its innate schema through which to interpret and interact with its environment, such as grasping and sucking. As that baby grows, however, new schemas develop and become more complex.
It will learn to distinguish objects and people, and to manipulate its surroundings.
As the child develops further, they build the schemas needed for abstract and symbolic concepts. These include spoken and written language, plus mathematical and logical reasoning.
Schema and Culture
People develop schemas for their own culture and for other cultures they encounter. These cultural schemas are stored in memory and help support a person’s cultural identity.
Once a schema forms, it focuses people’s attention on the relevant aspects of the culture they are experiencing. People respond to non-conforming aspects by assimilating, accommodating, or rejecting them.
For example, someone growing up in England may develop a schema around Christmas involving crackers, caroling, turkey, mince pies, and Saint Nicholas.
This schema can affirm someone’s cultural identity. If they spent Christmas in Sicily instead, the native schema would likely center on eating several types of fish.
A schema used for cultural understanding is more than a stereotype about the members of a culture.
While stereotypes tend to be rigid, schemas are dynamic and open to revision. Stereotypes also simplify and ignore group differences, but a schema can be complex (Rentsch, Mot, & Abbe, 2009).
Types of Schema
There are several types of schemata.
Event schema
Event schemas, often called cognitive scripts, describe behavioral and event sequences in daily activities. They provide a basis for anticipating the future, setting objectives, and making plans.
For example, people usually get hungry in the evening, which might lead them to make dinner reservations at a restaurant.
Event schemata are automatic and can be difficult to change, such as texting while driving.
Event schemata can vary widely between cultures and countries. People in the United States commonly greet one another with a handshake. In Tibet, a traditional greeting involves sticking out the tongue, while in Belize, people bump fists.
Self-schema
Self-schema is a term used to describe the knowledge that people accumulate about themselves by interacting with the natural world and with other human beings.
In turn, this influences people’s behavior towards others and their motivations.
Information about the self continually enters a person’s mind through experience and social interaction. As a result, the self-schema keeps evolving over the lifespan (Lemme, 2006).
Object schema
Object schemas help us interpret inanimate objects. They tell us what objects are, how they should function, and what we can expect from them.
For example, someone may have an object schema around how to use a pen.
Role schema
Role schemas invoke knowledge about how people are supposed to behave based on their roles in particular social situations (Callero, 1994).
For example, at a polite dinner party, a guest is expected not to rest their elbows on the table. They are also expected not to talk over others.
How Schemas Change
Piaget argued that people experience a biological urge to maintain equilibrium: a state of balance between internal schemas and the external environment. Equilibrium is the ability to fully understand what’s going on around us using our existing cognitive models.
Through the processes of accommodation and assimilation, schemas evolve and become more sophisticated.
- In assimilation, new information becomes incorporated into pre-existing schemas. The information itself does not change the schema, as the schema already accounts for the new information. Assimilation promotes the “status quo” of cognitive structures (Piaget, 1976).
For organisms to learn and develop, they must be able to adapt their schemas to new information and construct new schemas for unfamiliar concepts.
Piaget argued that we sometimes encounter new environmental information that doesn’t match our existing schemata. When that happens, we adjust and refine these schemas through accommodation.
- In accommodation, existing schemas may be altered or new ones formed as a person learns new information or has new experiences. This disrupts the structure of pre-existing schemas and may lead to the creation of a new schema altogether.
Generally, psychologists believe that schemas are easier to change during childhood than later in life. They may also persist despite encounters with evidence that contradicts an individual’s beliefs.
Consequently, as people grow and learn more about their world, their schemata become more specialized and refined until they are able to perform complex abstract cognitions.
Piaget argued that schema refinement has biological limits. Children of different ages can perform different cognitive operations, so age itself restricts how far their schemas can develop.
The differences between children’s and adults’ mental abilities are qualitative, not just quantitative. That is why 6-year-old rocket scientists are thin on the ground.
In other words, development is not just about how much information a person absorbs. It also depends on the types of cognitive operations they can perform on that information.
These operations are, in turn, determined by the child’s age and physiological development. Piaget argued that children move through a series of stages as they age, each bringing the ability to perform more sophisticated cognitive operations.
How Schemas Affect Learning
Several instructional strategies can follow from schema theory.
One of the most relevant implications of schema theory to teaching is the role that prior knowledge plays in students’ processing of information.
For learners to process information effectively, something needs to activate their existing schemas related to the new content. For instance, a student would struggle to fully interpret the implications of Jacobinism without an existing schema for the French Revolution (Widmayer, 2001).
Popular theories of learning reflect this idea that schema activation matters. For example, the third of Gagne’s nine conditions of learning is “Stimulating Recall of Prior Knowledge.”
Learners under schema theory acquire knowledge in a similar way to Piaget’s model of cognitive developments. There are three main reactions that a learner can have to new information (Widmayer, 2001):
- Accretion: In accretion, learners assimilate a new input into their existing schema without making any changes to the overall schema.
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- For example, a learner might already believe that “all plants undergo photosynthesis.” Learning that grass and tree leaves do too fits this schema without changing it.
- Many teachers use “metacognitive” strategies to activate a learner’s schema before reading. These include previewing the heading, looking at visuals in the text, and predicting the content from the title and pictures (Widmayer, 2001).
- Teachers can also pre-activate a schema using analogies and comparisons. These draw attention to what learners already know and help them connect it to new information (Armbruster, 1996; Driscoll, 1997).
- Tuning: Tuning is when learners realize that their existing schema is inadequate for the new knowledge and thus modify their existing schema accordingly.
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- For example, a learner might realize that a particular preposition sounds wrong in a certain sentence structure. They then need to modify their schema for when that word is or isn’t appropriate to use.
- Scholars have noted that knowledge transfer is difficult outside the context where it was first learned. Learners may need exposure to the same knowledge in many different contexts. Only then can they build a schema that is not tied to one situation (Price & Driscoll, 1997).
- Restructuring: Finally, restructuring is the process of creating a new schema that addresses the inconsistencies between the old schema and the newly acquired information.
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- For example, a learner might discover that corn is technically a fruit. They may need to overhaul their entire schema for “fruit” to fit this new information.
Unlike Piaget, schema theorists do not see each schema as representative of discrete developmental stages. Instead, the processes of accretion, tuning, and restructuring happen across multiple domains in a continuous time frame (Widmayer, 2001).
According to schema theory, knowledge is not necessarily stored hierarchically. Instead, the learner actively constructs it, representing it propositionally based on the meanings they attach to it.
In addition to schemas, psychologists believe that learners also have mental models. These are dynamic models for problem-solving, based on a learner’s existing schema and their perceptions of task demand and performance.
Rather than starting from nothing, people have imprecise, partial, and idiosyncratic understandings to tasks that evolve with experience (Driscoll, 1994).
Critical Evaluation
Schema theory explains how humans process knowledge, but some scholars argue it is ill-constrained.
This lack of constraint gives the theory enough flexibility to explain almost any set of empirical data.
This flexibility also limits the theory’s predictive value, making it harder to test scientifically (Thorndyke & Yekovich, 1979).
Thorndyke and Yekovich (1979) elaborated on this weakness. They noted that it is difficult to find data inconsistent with schema theory. As a result, it has largely been used to describe existing data rather than predict new findings.
They also argued that schema theory under-specifies the detailed processes involved in manipulating and creating schemas.
One competing theory to schema theory is Ausubel’s Meaningful Reception Learning Theory (1966). It states that learners learn best when new material can be anchored to their existing cognitive structures.
In contrast to Ausubel’s theory, the learner in schema theory actively builds schemas and revises them in light of new information.
As a result, each schema is unique, shaped by that person’s own experiences and cognitive processes.
Ausubel proposed a hierarchical organization of knowledge where the learner more or less attaches new knowledge to an existing hierarchy. In this representation, structure, as well as meaning, drives memory.
Contemporary Research
Modern neuroscience has traced schema effects to a specific brain circuit: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) working together with the hippocampus during memory consolidation.
Tse et al. (2007) trained rats to find food flavors hidden in fixed locations, building up a spatial schema. New memories that fit this schema then consolidated remarkably fast, within 24 to 48 hours rather than the usual weeks. This rapid, schema-dependent consolidation depended on the mPFC.
Ghosh and Gilboa (2014) reviewed the neuroscience literature on memory schemas. They proposed a formal definition of a memory schema as a network of linked associations, distinct from related ideas such as scripts and semantic memory. They also set out criteria for when a brain representation counts as schematic.
Together, these findings give Bartlett’s century-old insight a biological mechanism.
An existing schema can speed up how quickly the brain learns anything that fits it. That is exactly the efficiency, and the bias, that behavioral schema theory predicts.
Applications
Schemas are a major determinant of how people think, feel, behave, and interact socially. People generally accept their schemas as truths about the world outside of awareness, despite how they influence the processing of experiences.
Schema therapy, developed by Jeffrey E. Young (1990), is an integrative therapy approach and theoretical framework used to treat patients, most often with personality disorders.
Schema therapy evolved from cognitive behavioral therapy.
Those with personality disorders often fail to respond to traditional cognitive behavioral theory (Beck et al., 1990). Rather than targeting acute psychiatric symptoms, schema therapy targets the underlying characteristics of personality disorders.
The schema therapy model has three main constructs (Martin & Young, 2009):
- Schemas: core psychological themes.
- Coping styles: characteristic behavioral responses to schemas.
- Modes: the schemas and coping styles operating at a given moment.
According to the schema therapy framework, the earliest and most central schemas tend to originate in one’s childhood. These schemas begin as representations of the child’s environment, grounded in reality. They develop from the interaction between a child’s innate temperament and specific, unmet childhood needs (Martin & Young, 2009).
Schema therapy seeks to alter these long-standing schemas by helping people to:
- identify and heal their own schemas,
- identify and address coping styles that get in the way of emotional needs,
- change patterns of feeling and behaviors that result from schemas,
- learn how to get core emotional needs met in a healthy and adaptive way,
- and learn how to cope healthily with frustration and distress when certain needs cannot be met.
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