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CHAPTER 11
Gettin’ Your Schema On! Imagine you’re an alien. You just crashed-landed your spaceship on earth. You weren’t planning on coming here. You’ve had no prior contact with earthlings. You know zilch, zero, nada about life on earth. OK that might be an acceptable excuse for having no preexisting knowledge relevant to the human experience, but that’s about the only excuse! Everyone else, even high school students, have some prior knowledge about almost everything. It may be a little, it may be a lot – but it’s there, inside their head. Prior knowledge is called schema and it’s uber-important because schema provides links and context for new, incoming information. Schema is acquired as facts and ideas learned in a formal school setting and by life experience. By now you’ve had quite a bit of both. The fact is, students rarely learn something completely new. Textbooks, lessons and curriculum are designed to progressively build skills and knowledge. What you studied today in science has a connection to something you learned or studied before— maybe a week ago, maybe last year. You have a developed a schema in all subjects. In this chapter you’ll learn how and why to activate your schema as a pre-learning strategy.
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PRODUCT PREVIEW
*Bonus! Translate from Klingon: ___________________________________
Learning Goals By the end of this chapter you will be able to: 1. Define schema. 2. State the benefits of activating schema as a pre- learning strategy. 3. Describe nine schema activation techniques.
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