Chaper 20

Chapter 20
Role of the Reader’s Schema in Comprehension, Learning, and Memory by Richard C. Anderson

Susan Conklin
For Michael’s Class
Fall 2007

Anderson’s attempt is to define reader’s schema and its role in comprehension, learning and remembering when confronted with text. Listeners’ schema awakens during the “cutting and fitting” process to understand the message. If one has knowledge about any topic and new information or problems introduced, the interpretation is complete and consistent. The reader captures not only the words but also their intended meaning. A reader with little or no knowledge on neither the topic nor effective understanding of the language, particularly Tier 3 vocabulary, that person will be confused however without a schema to meet the incoming information and a protocol for using that information. What is critical is a schema to understand the relationship of the elements in any particular communication. Additionally, more than one interpretation of text is possible depending on the reader’s culture. The brief example in this reading did not identify the situation. The text refers to a hold and considering escape. Subsequently, the reader learns that the passage refers to wrestling though a reader might project the schema of prison onto the text.

The thesis of this article is that comprehension is a matter of either building or activating a schema facilitating a coherent understanding of objects and events to form meaning of sentences and paragraphs to understand the whole message. A schema provides ideational scaffolding to support the listener in assimilating information. Metaphorically, schema provides a slot for the main entrée of information or parallel CSI information for solving mysteries. If the reader has a schema, the information enters into memory and other cognitive processes with relative ease and speed. Schema provides a way of allocating attention paid to information and selecting what are important aspects in the text. Additionally schema enables and allows:
Inferential elaboration: go beyond the text for what is not clear
Orderly memory searches: what was the appetizer? Soup? Etc.
Editing and summarizing: reader produces significant summaries
Inferential reconstruction: generate hypothesis about missing info

To be fair, a student must have schema created and must develop all of the above functions of schema in order to make sense of text. (This reminds me that a graduate student venturing to study content and evidence-based curriculum of a profession not previously studied finds initial contact with Tier 3 vocabulary extremely challenging. No doubt, this is the basis for a new reality TV series focusing on cognition survival.)

The awareness of the role of schema theory on comprehension would help the teacher differentiate between the students who cannot understand because of compromised cognitive abilities from the one who is merely lacking necessary schema. Similarly, culturally sensitive topics offer varying interpretations and an educator who is aware of these alternatives can listen with a multidimensional inner ear. Additionally, emotional responses to content can vary if material is offensive or insensitive to the state of being of the reader.

This article cited two food passages (one from a supermarket and one from a restaurant). Recall from the restaurant menu text was greater than for the supermarket items precisely because it matters more what one orders from a menu than what one throws into a supermarket cart. Hence, the amount of engagement with the text matters.

When readers were assigned roles during the reading of text, they learned more, e.g. pretending an identity before reading a text framed the breadth and depth of information accessed. Then when switching roles, learners continued to hold information from the first role yet learned the information in depth from the second role as well.

Relevant knowledge activated before learning builds schema for approaching text and promotes comprehension. Additionally, prediction techniques, such as Directed Reading-Thinking Activity causes readers to search their stored knowledge developing prediction. This group recalled 72% of the sentences in a study by Anderson, Mason, and Shirey (1984) while others’ recall was a mere 43%.

The author urges publishers to employ devices that highlight the structure of text material, provide advance organizers or structured overviews to facilitate comprehension. Additionally, be alert to culturally different schemata of students who are not part of the mainstream culture. However, the author feels that it is safe to assume the children from various subcultures will ascribe the same goals and motives to characters and imagine the same sequence of actions, predict the same emotional reactions or expect the same outcomes.