Chapter 21: Schema Activation and Schema Acquisition: Comments on Richard C. Anderson's Remarks

Chapter 21: Schema Activation and Schema Acquisition: Comments on Richard C. Anderson's Remarks
John D. Bransford
· In this chapter, Bransford (1984) provides commentary, elaboration, questions, and constructive criticism on the work of Richard C. Anderson in Chapter 20.
· First, Bransford validates Anderson’s hypothesis about the six functions of schemata, and summarizes them as follows.
Schemata provide a basis for:
1) Absorbing and understanding text information
2) Filling in gaps in messages by making inferential elaborations
3) Allotting attention to important elements in text
4) Searching memory in an orderly fashion
5) Composing and arranging a summary of information
6) Making inferences in order to reconstruct information even if certain details have been forgotten
· Bransford acknowledges Anderson’s “powerful argument for the pervasive effects of students’ preexisting knowledge” on their performance.
· He reasserts Anderson’s contention that the activation of background knowledge is fundamental to comprehension.
· He claims that many children fail to comprehend not because of some internal “deficit” in memory or comprehension, but because they lack or fail to activate background knowledge.
· There are several ways in which children may lack the background knowledge to efficiently and competently comprehend text. (Therefore, the question of a child’s “familiarity” with words used in a story is more complex than it might at first appear.)
1) The child may have little or no information about a concept
2) The child may have some knowledge about the concept, yet still not possess sufficient knowledge to comprehend it.
3) The child’s individual interpretation of a statement or concept may have implications for comprehension.
· Subtle differences in an individual’s schemata may have important effects on her comprehension.
· Bransford and colleagues are concerned about the subtle “mismatches” between an individual child’s initial interpretations and a teacher’s or text author’s questions. If a child’s schemata have provided one interpretation and the question(s) follow(s) another line of interpretation, the teacher may erroneously assume the child did not learn.
· These “mismatches” can cause decreases in memory performance, provoke confusion, and also affect students’ assumptions about their own abilities as learners.
· Bransford and Johnson (1973) conducted a study in which college students were given a story to read.
· One interpretation of the events in the story seemed more obvious to the students. The students became confused when the researchers then posed questions from another perspective.
·The students concluded they had completely misinterpreted the story and apologized for their misinterpretation.
· However, their interpretation was not “wrong”; it was simply a mismatch between their initial interpretations and the researchers’ questions about the story.
· Bransford poses questions and addresses some possible shortcomings regarding schema theory.
·Mismatches are less likely to occur when materials are “simplified” to align more congruently with children’s existing knowledge bases.
· However, the question arises, to what degree should texts be simplified and should they be simplified at all?
· Texts can contain information composed of simpler words and syntax that still seem random, unrelated and difficult for novice learners to remember.
· In addition, children want to read stories about novel situations, not stories that are dull and overfamiliar.
· Therefore, how does schema theory account for the fact that it is possible to understand stories about novel situations for which there are no preexisting schema?
· Bransford notes that up to that point, schema theorists had not adequately addressed how novel events unrelated to preexisting schema are understood and how new schema are built (construction) and incorporated into preexisting schema.
· Bransford notes that Anderson’s experiments dealt mostly with schema activation.
· Bransford is more concerned with schema acquisition, since it is the role of educators to enable students to learn new information and to develop new skills.The issue of schema construction or acquisition is extremely important, as is the issue of helping students to refine or reassemble schemata they already possess.
·Bransford notes this is consistent with Ausubel’s Theory of Meaningful Learning (1963, 1968) which advocates the use of advance organizers.
· These organizers, however, can be vague or general. They are adequate when students have already gained the knowledge they need to understand a text
The general statements in these organizers can “prime concepts learners might fail to activate spontaneously”.
·They are not adequate when the learner is confronted with certain facts and information whose relationships seem arbitrary, and therefore, not easy to remember.
· These facts and information will not be easily remembered or learned if they are not “precisely elaborated.”
· Ex. “The tall man bought the crackers” is not easy to remember. Neither is “The tall man bought crackers from the clerk”, although both make sense semantically.
· But “The tall man bought crackers lying on the highest shelf” is an elaboration enabling the reader to link the subject to the reason for the activity.
· In other words, new facts should be related to background knowledge in a way that shows the significance of the new information and its relationship to the old.
· Ex. Facts such as “Camels can close their nose passages” and “Camels have thick air around their ear openings” may seem arbitrary to a student who either does not have or does not access schema about desert sandstorms.
·Acquiring schema about desert climate and living conditions and animals’
survival mechanisms would enable the same student to infer why desert dwellers or travelers wear scarves over their faces even when weather is very hot.
· Simplifying texts per se may be a self-defeating process if writers omit the precise elaborations crucial to understanding the significance of the information. Many texts are written simply but still seem arbitrary because relationships between facts and ideas and/or structure and function are not precisely elaborated.
· Bransford makes one final important point, in seeming contrast to earlier ideas.
· He believes children’s materials must not always be elaborated explicitly.
· Children themselves must be taught to identify situations where they need more information in order to comprehend more precisely. They must learn to supply their own elaborations and to learn about themselves as learners (metacognitive strategies)
· Less able learners have :
1) little insight into what makes things easy or difficult to understand and
2) seldom if ever use available facts to understand or to integrate new information into existing schema
· Bransford and colleagues purposefully created "arbitrary" learning materials and then led students through a process of evaluation to help them learn to make the materials relevant to their own background knowledge and therefore significant and comprehensible.
· This process was important to enabling children to become independent learners.
· In closing, Bransford reemphasizes that the process of merely simplifying textbooks will not necessarily assist children in acquiring schema or facilitate their quests to become independent, proficient learners.