Why are schema theory and mental models important in teaching and learning?
It’s important to understand that schemata are powerful forces in learning. In an article on the role of schemata in story comprehension, Stein and Trabasso (1982) noted that: • Schematic knowledge has a significant effect on organization of ambiguous or disorganized stories. • Narrative schemata specify expected components of a story, such as the time sequence of events, and causal relations that should connect the events; during encoding or retrieval of a story, missing events may be inferred to fill in omitted information, and events may be reordered to correspond to a real-time sequence. • Many studies have shown that the use of schematic knowledge is so powerful that listeners have little control over the retrieval strategies used during recall of narrative information; even when listeners are instructed to reproduce texts verbatim, they cannot do so when the text contains certain types of omissions or certain sequences of events. For example, consider the following excerpt from a
