Reading and Scheming: How Schema Theory, Cognitive Frameworks, and Background Knowledge Support Literacy Instruction

As a plucky (read: obnoxious) middle schooler, I got frustrated easily trying to understand why others had such trouble operating technology. Once you’ve used one kind of digital watch, camera, or computer program, I always felt, it wasn’t that hard to get your bearings with a different model and figure out how different buttons, controls, or menus still allowed you to do what you wanted. If I’m being honest, this feeling continued into adulthood, but, you know, I learned some tact.

I even remember an instance when I must have been about 12 in which I decided that I wanted to record a TV show while out of the house. The solution? Teach myself how to perform that colloquially impossible task of “programming the VCR.” Honestly, it wasn’t that hard, and the obfuscating interface just reminded me of my nerdtacular wrist watch. But it solidified an adolescent presumtion that most technolophobia was overblown, if not nonsensical.

But here’s the thing: that presumtion was adolescent because I didn’t understand why it was so easy for me to make connections between how to operate various gadgets. Moreover, I didn’t understand exactly why the more I tinkered with LEGOs, ropes and pulleys, flying apparatae, and command-line interfaces, the easier it was to understand the next technology I started taking apart.

Earlier this year, I learned about schema theory, which explaines why the more you know about something, the more you can learn about it and concepts related to it.

The remainder of this post is a blogified version of a presentation I made for an online grad class on the processes and methods of childhood literacy acquisition. The focus, then, is on how schema theory applies to reading nonfiction. But the theory is powerful enough that it’s something I think (metacognitively) about on a weekly basis. I find it useful for thinking about how to work with students in middle school, but also to think about why, in certain instances, it might make less sense for me to get frustrated at the gap between my own technology literacy and that of others, and might make more sense for me to help the people around me build their own schema for “programming a VCR.” If you’d rather just see the slides, here’s a pdf.

Introducing Schemata: What does this sentence mean?

“Drew scored on Pedroia’s one-out sacrifice in the third, his hundredth RBI of the year.”

For a given reader, this sentence may be decodable, but without appropriate background knowledge, the reader will lack a schema to comprehend the information. Let’s break it down:

“Drew scored on Pedroia’s one-out sacrifice in the third, his hundredth RBI of the year.”

Drew & Pedroia	These are baseball players.
“one-out sacrifice in the third”	This means there was one out in the third inning, and Pedroia hit a “sacrifice fly,” meaning he hit the ball & it got caught, but Drew had time to reach home base.
“his hundredth RBI of the year”	RBI means “Runs Batted In,” a count of the runs Pedroia has helped others score. One hundred in a year indicates a successful hitter.

Schema & Absorption Rate

In order to understand a selection like this, you must use knowledge that you bring to the text in order to gain new information from the text (Gunning, 2011, p. 308). Having an appropriate schema for organizing new knowledge determines how much information you can absorb (Lemov, 2011, p80).

Two readers with different amounts of background knowledge in a baseball schema will absorb very different amounts of information:

Readers coming to the text with a baseball schema will learn new information about the players Drew and Pedroia, particularly about Pedroia’s skill scoring runs for his team.

Readers coming to the text without a schema for baseball will not learn any new information. They will likely be confused.

Schema Theory

Developed by educational psychologist R. C. Anderson, schema theory posits that comprehending a text requires activating an existing schema or creating a new schema that organizes the information. The schema is a framework that a reader uses to comprehend new information by sorting it into appropriate categories or pockets (Gunning 2011, p308).

A schema can be general: Animals

what an animal looks like
where an animal lives
what an animal eats
how an animal behaves

Or a it can be specific: Siamese cat

short, light hair with dark faces
lives in houses with humans
eats cat food
lounges, might hunt small rodents

Background Knowledge Makes You Smarter

With more background knowledge, a reader can understand text at a higher level of comprehension. As a result, readers can then amass more background knowledge. More reading equals more schemata, which means more comprehension, which enables more reading, and the cycle repeats.

A Schema As a Script

Anderson likens schema activation to outlining a script & fitting specific story elements into the appropriate “slots.” Gunning offers this example for the story of a character buying a bicycle, which activates a reader’s “buying-and-selling” schema:

“The student fills in the buyer and seller slots with the characters’ names. The bicycle is placed in the merchandise slot. The story says that the buyer got a good deal, so that is placed in the bargaining slot. The story may not say how the character paid for the bike—cash, check, credit card, or an IOU—but the reader may infer that it was with cash because in her or his buying-and-selling schema, goods are purchased with cash” (Gunning 2011, p308).

Schemata for Nonfiction

While the narrative-focused schema in the bicycle example is fairly straightforward, children develop schemata for expository of non-fiction text more slowly than for stories (Gunning, 2011, p368).

Fiction	Nonfiction
organization is typically a story with beginning, middle, and end students usually have lot sof experience with stories in different formats linear & predictable: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution	greater variety of organizational patterns students usually have limited experience hearing & reading nonfiction not necessarily linear; hardto predict what will happen next

Text Features as a Schema for Nonfiction

One useful schema for helping students comprehend nonfiction is the framework for text features that support the content of the text. Text features can include italic and bold print for important words, charts and graphs for statistics, or labels that describe illustrations. Some other basic text features and their purpose include:

By fitting the information in a nonfiction article into a schema for text features, a student can better identify important information, visualize what he or she is reading about, and retain the organized information. Check out this example, which I used for several lessons in my class last year:

Title: “Pro Athletes’ Salaries Aren’t Overly Exorbitant”
Image: Baseball player signing autographs
Caption: Explains that autographs are being signed at 75th All-Star Game.
Byline: Mark Singletary

Schemata Everywhere

With an understanding of schema theory, a literacy teacher can:

Ask what types of schemata a student will need to comprehend a given text
Support student comprehension of a text by activating an existing schema or building background knowledge
Help students build their own background knowledge and reading confidence by helping them acquire new schemata
Practice metacognition by paying attention to his or her own use of a schema when comprehending new information

Sources

Gunning, T. (2011). Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students (Kindle Edition). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Lemov, Doug. (2011). Uncommon Schools Reading Workshop. [Presentation]. Talk presented at New York Education Department. New York, NY. Retrieved from http://engageny.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Doug-Lemov-11-29-11.pdf

SIL International. (1999). Schema theory of learning. LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0. Retrieved from http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/literacy/ImplementALiteracyProgram/SchemaTheoryOfLearning.htm