The term schema refers to the cognitive structures we have to describe various categories of knowledge about the world.

Theorist Jean Piaget introduced the term schema, and they are linked to his theory of cognitive development, which said that children go through a series of stages of intellectual growth.

In Piaget’s theory, a schema is both the category of knowledge as well as the process of acquiring that knowledge. He believed that people are constantly adapting to the environment as they take in new information and learn new things based on their experiences.

Schemas are really important in learning because they affect what we pay attention to, make things easier to learn, affect how we interpret incoming information and allow us to think and act more quickly.

Schemas can be a positive force and a negative one, making us reject information our existing schemas have negative experiences of.

There are 4 types of schemas;

Schemas are constantly adjusted or changed by assimilation; where we absorb knowledge into an existing framework, or accommodation where we make big changes to existing schemas or create new ones.

Schemas tend to be easier to change during childhood but can become increasingly rigid and difficult to modify as people grow older. Schemas will often persist even when people are presented with evidence that contradicts their beliefs.

Schemas therefore, grow and develop from birth and are formed from how we interpret the sum of all the knowledge and information we process. They can be partly complete, biased, misinformed, and misguided, but also correct and beneficial, helping us to learn more efficiently. They are strongly linked to cognitive development and there are several leading theories about how they form:

Freud believed that it was early experiences that played the greatest role in shaping development, and that they were set in stone by the age of 5.

Erikson believed that social interaction and experience played decisive roles. His eight-stage theory of human development described this process from infancy through death. During each stage, people are faced with a developmental conflict that impacts later functioning and further growth.

Behaviorism, focuses purely on how experience shapes who we are and gives no consideration to internal thoughts or feelings. See classical conditioning and operant conditioning.

Like Piaget, Vygotsky believed that children learn actively and through hands-on experiences. His sociocultural theory also suggested that parents, caregivers, peers and the culture at large were responsible for developing higher-order functions. In Vygotsky’s view, learning is an inherently social process. Through interacting with others, learning becomes integrated into an individual’s understanding of the world. His concept of proximal development is the gap between what a person can do with help and what they can do on their own. It is with the help of more knowledgeable others that people are able to progressively learn and increase their skills and scope of understanding.

According to Bandura’s social learning theory, behaviors can also be learned through observation and modeling. Whilst observation plays a critical role in learning, this does not necessarily need to take the form of watching a live model. Instead, can also learn by listening to verbal instructions about how to perform a behavior as well as through observing either real or fictional characters displaying behaviors in books or films.

Schemas are critical to learning. They are formed from the sum of all our experiences of the world and how we interact with it. Schemas are strongly linked to cognitive development and are constantly changing.

What is also affecting our schemas is latent learning. This is learning that occurs in the absence of any obvious reinforcement or noticeable behavioural changes. See Tolman and also Soderstrom and Bjork. So we can’t assume that things haven’t been learned, just because demonstration of that learning is incomplete. Everything goes into our mental compost heap!!

Most research in this field, over more than a hundred years, shows that children primarily learn through active learning and hands-on experiences in social situations, from a variety of sources – parents, peers, carers, teachers, environment and social situations.

Even semantic, declarative knowledge is not the sole property of the school, since people also learn this from the media, books, the internet and from the same external source listed above. In addition, children will pursue their own interests outside of school and might have very robust, existing schemas about topics that might affect or hinder the learning the teacher wishes to embed.