What Are Schemas, and How Can They Help Your Students Learn?

What Are Schemas, and How Can They Help Your Students Learn?

Everything you know is tied to a schema. What does that mean? Consider this example: when you read the word car, you know that it refers to a mode of transportation that has tires, doors, seats, and a steering wheel. When you get in a car, you seamlessly put on your seatbelt, turn the car on, and check your mirrors before you shift gears, put your foot on the gas pedal, and drive away. All these facts and behaviors are part of your car schema.

“Cognitive scientists think of deep learning—or what you might call ‘learning for understanding’—as the ability to organize discrete pieces of knowledge into a larger schema of understanding.”
(Meta & Fine 2019 as cited in Stern 2019)

A schema is a knowledge structure that allows the brain to more easily understand the world and how we should act it in it (Nickerson 2023). As we take in new information, we connect it to other things we know, believe, or have experienced, and those connections form an intricate web of related information in our brain (Stern 2019). The schemas in our brain are always changing, and the more we use them, the more developed they become and the easier it is to remember them (Cognitive Load Theory 2022).

Why Do Schemas Matter for Teaching and Learning?

When you teach students something new, you want them to remember what they’ve learned and to be able to flexibly apply and extend that knowledge. Taking new information in and integrating it into long-term memory, again and again, is how students build a body of knowledge and skills that sticks with them throughout school and their lives. But the reality is that students often quickly forget what they’ve learned or struggle to apply their learning in new contexts. If that’s the case, where might things be breaking down, and where do schemas come into play?

Our working memory has a limited capacity, and cognitive load refers to the effort it takes for our working memory to make sense of information at any given time. The complexity of a task or material, the amount of information being taken in at once, and the effort needed to convert new information into schemas in our long-term memory all contribute to the overall cognitive load placed on a learner (Pande 2022). When that load is high, learning—or successfully organizing information and moving it into long-term memory—will be much more difficult.

One way to free up space in our working memory and ease the learning process is to engage schemas that we already have in our long-term memory. Why does this help? Because even highly complex schemas count as one chunk of information in our working memory, and these schemas provide context that allows us to make sense of new information (Cognitive Load Theory 2022). In other words, grouping information into schemas acts as a shortcut in our brain that makes storing and recalling new things much quicker and more efficient.

Unlock the Power of Schema with a Knowledge-Building Curriculum

Supporting students’ learning so that knowledge and skills stick with them can be tricky. The good news is that students are not blank slates; they come to school having already developed schemas that can help them access new content. The challenge is that it takes effort and intention to not only activate students’ existing schemas in a way that really helps their learning but to also help students expand those schemas and build new ones that will support their learning over time.

This is difficult in practice because schemas are not built with one pass at something new; they are built through multiple experiences that allow us to make and refine connections between new information and what we already know (Buschkuehl, n.d.; Cognitive Load Theory 2022; Stern 2019). Crafting those experiences for students needs to be deliberate, which takes a lot of planning and coordination. This is where a high-quality, research-based curriculum can be a valuable tool for teachers and students in the learning process. Curricula can intentionally help students learn and build knowledge through thoughtful design that attends to topic sequencing, scaffolding, and breadth and depth of content covered.

Wit & Wisdom® and Geodes® do just that: They were built with the benefits of knowledge building in mind. Both programs consider students’ entire learning journey and make sure that students have the guidance and structure they need to develop rich and meaningful schemas that they understand, remember, and can use again and again. This design reduces cognitive load and supports students as they develop strong reading and writing skills.

Let’s explore the three primary ways that Wit & Wisdom and Geodes consider and build schemas within a grade level, across grade levels, and even across content areas.

1. The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Institute for Education Policy developed a Knowledge Map™ for English language arts and analyzed curricula for the knowledge they offer students about the world and the human condition.
   
   The analysis included a quality assessment of the texts included in the curricula, Heat Maps of exposure to different knowledge domains within and across grades, and the coherence of each module in the curricula.
   
   Wit & Wisdom and Geodes were highly rated by the Knowledge Map analysis with all grade levels meeting or exceeding the 70% threshold defined by JHU for high quality.

   Building Schemas Across Grade Levels: Instead of having students read a random collection of texts—maybe about animals one day and the moon the next—each Wit & Wisdom grade level contains four modules, with each focusing on a single topic for several weeks at a time. Wit & Wisdom writers carefully selected texts that would build students’ knowledge on a topic from a variety of sources and perspectives, allowing words and concepts to strategically recur with greater depth of meaning and complexity over time. Texts are sequenced throughout a module in a way that supports students in comprehending new ideas, acquiring new vocabulary, and asking strong questions that help them add to their knowledge of the topic and the world.
   
   For example, at the end of Grade 2, students study how food nourishes their body physically and emotionally, how food can build community, and the importance of making informed choices about what we eat.
   
   The two texts students rely on for evidence in their End-of-Module Task are information dense, language rich, and require background knowledge about food and nutrition. But the way the text sets are organized in the module helps students develop their ability to access these texts.
   
   

   Core Texts	How do these texts build students’ knowledge in the module?
   The Digestive System – “© 2008 Scholastic, Inc.” and “© Teacher Created Materials, Inc.”	Students start by learning the basics of digestion with their first two informational texts, learning how food moves through the body and provides it with energy. Through these texts, students acquire academic vocabulary and extended practice with using text features to guide them in reading informational texts. Students build useful content-specific vocabulary such as digest, starches, and stomach that they will use throughout the module.
   Bone Button Borscht – “© 1996 Aubrey Davis and Duyan Petricic” Stone Soup – “© 1974 Marcia Brown”	Then students read literary texts that explore how food can bring people together and nourish a community while they also practice opinion writing for the first time. Students build useful academic vocabulary such as cooperate, benefit, and community.
   The Vegetables We Eat – “© 2007 Gail Gibbons”	Students learn about different types of vegetables and how they are grown, processed, and moved to grocery stores and farm stands. Students learn content vocabulary such as root, tuber, and harvested.
   Good Enough to Eat – “© 1999 Lizzy Rockwell”	Students learn more about how they can choose nourishing foods by reading about how different foods nourish their bodies. Students continue to build useful vocabulary with words such as nutrients, vitamin, and mineral.

   
   Geodes also intentionally build student knowledge by exploring connected topics across multiple books, which are organized into modules based on the content and progression of the Wit & Wisdom module topics. That means those same Grade 2 students studying how food nourishes their body during English language arts (ELA) instruction can continue to expand their knowledge of the module 4 topic, Good Eating, with Geodes books. While practicing new skills that were explicitly taught during foundational skills instruction, students read and learn about the processes of the digestive system with books such as How Do You Chew? and Body of Water and about the celebration of life through food with books such as Mooncakes and Matzo Meal. Carefully selected Recurring Content Words that repeat across books in the module help students access and express knowledge about each topic.
   
   
   
   These texts all contribute to the knowledge puzzle, the larger body of knowledge or schemas, that students will be able to reflect on and demonstrate through their work in the module.
   
   
   
2. Building Schemas Across Grade Levels: Wit & Wisdom module topics vertically align so that from Kindergarten through Grade 8, students continue to cohesively build knowledge across different topics related to science, history, geography, and more. Providing opportunities for students to experience the same topic in an age-appropriate way over an extended period allows them to expand their vocabulary, make connections within and between texts and ideas, and not only broaden but also deepen their body of knowledge and transfer it to new contexts.
   
   
   
   

   Grade	Module 1	Module 2	Module 3	Module 4
   K	The Five Senses	Once Upon A Farm	America, Then and Now	The Continents
   1	A World of Books	Creature Features	Powerful Forces	Cinderella Stories
   2	A Season of Change	The American West	Civil Rights Heroes	Good Eating
   3	The Sea	Outer Space	A New Home	Artists Make Art
   4	A Great Heart	Extreme Settings	The Redcoats Are Coming!	Myth Making
   5	Cultures in Conflict	Word Play	The War Between Us	Breaking Barriers
   6	"Resilience in the Great Depression"	A Hero’s Journey	Narrating the Unknown	Courage in Crisis
   7	Identity in the Middle Ages	Americans All	Language and Power	Fever
   8	The Poetics and Power of Storytelling	The Great War	What Is Love?	Teens as Change Agents

   
   In the map of ELA modules above, knowledge-building topics related to science are highlighted in blue and show how students will revisit common concepts and themes across grade levels. For example, in Kindergarten, students explore some of the science that is essential to farm life, including the effects of the seasons and how different farm animals help humans. Then, in Grade 1, students study animals and their characteristics followed by the power of the wind and how humans have harnessed its energy. In Grade 2, students focus on seasons as an example of change and transformation and the science behind the transition from fall to winter. Later, in Grade 4, students read about the science of extreme settings—about how weather, terrain, wild animals, and other natural elements can make a setting challenging for humans to survive in. And then in Grade 6, students build on their learning by studying how the natural environment is both affected by and poses challenges during major historical events.
   
   Through these experiences, students are building robust schemas about different animals and their unique qualities, types of weather, each of the four seasons, and more that they can use to access increasingly complex texts and ideas, which serve as a foundation for their growing literacy skills.
   
   
3. Building Schemas Across Content Areas: Many of the science-related schemas that are built with Wit & Wisdom and Geodes also support, and are supported by, instruction with PhD Science®. The first way this is done is at the text level. There are at least 10 texts—including The Buffalo Are Back, Amos and Boris, and Over and Under the Pond—that are Wit & Wisdom core or Volume of Reading texts that are also PhD Science core texts, and two additional Geodes books that are core or suggested texts in PhD Science. By exposing students to some of the same texts in both literary and scientific contexts, students can draw on their knowledge of the text and the schemas they have built around it as a foundation for learning new information and applying what they know.
   
   In addition to shared texts, Wit & Wisdom, Geodes, and PhD Science work together more broadly at the topic level to help students build and use well-developed schemas in their learning. Comparing the PhD Science Module Map to the ELA module topics, you see that several topics repeat across content areas, including modules related to weather and climate, survival, forces and energy, animal traits, ecosystems, and outer space
   
   Since instruction with Wit & Wisdom and Geodes is rich in science-related content, there are countless opportunities, big and small, to connect ELA and science instruction to support student learning. Here are just a few examples that bring these cross-content connections to life.
   
   
   • Animals: In Wit & Wisdom Grade 1, Module 2: Creature Features, students discover the diverse characteristics, or features, of the bodies and behaviors of all kinds of animals and identify similarities and differences across species. Core texts such as What Do You Do With A Tail Like This and Me … Jane offer rich content as students learn to describe the main ideas and key details of informational texts and write informative paragraphs with growing independence.
     
     During foundational skills practice with Geodes, students build more Creature Features knowledge as they explore types of animal communication in Smell Tells and Elephant Talk and study defense adaptations that animals use to survive in Super Spiny Mouse and Thorny Devil. Throughout this ELA module, students build schema for different animals and learn terms such as features, unique, reproduce, mammal, sea, group, and more.
     
     Students will be able to use this knowledge during science instruction when they encounter the PhD Science modules on Traits and on Sense and Response. In Level 3, Module 3: Traits, students study individual variation in humpback whales, the anchor phenomenon, and answer the Essential Question, “What makes an individual humpback whale unique?” In doing so they learn about traits of different species, how traits are influenced by inheritance and the environment, and how traits affect the life cycle of an individual and a species. These experiences help students build knowledge of key scientific terms such as traits, unique, reproduction, species, variation, mate, individual, and advantage. Later, in Level 4, Module 3: Sense and Response, students investigate the anchor phenomenon of elephants’ ability to sense rainstorms from a great distance to study how animals use their senses to learn about their environment.
     
     
   • Wind: In Wit & Wisdom Grade 1, Module 3: Powerful Forces, students discover the capacity of wind and the emotions it evokes. Throughout the module, students read core texts including The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and Gilberto and the Wind and engage with supplementary poetry, videos, and paintings that feature wind and windmills. Students learn sensory words to describe the invisible force of wind and explore how wind moves objects and generates power.
     
     During foundational skills practice with Geodes, students build more knowledge of Powerful Forces as they read about the wind and its effects in In Motion, explore how wind energy can be harnessed and used in Kite Messengers and The Wright Brothers, and learn about the history and function of windmills in Wind Giants and Towers of Nashtifan. Vocabulary words that students learn throughout this module—such as air, blow, windmill, fly, sky, and powerful—provide context for their future science learning.
     
     In PhD Science Level 4, Module 2: Energy, students observe the anchor phenomenon of windmills, which harness the wind to generate electricity. Students learn that energy is why things happen in the world around them, and they continue to develop their knowledge of energy classification, transfer, and transformation. Throughout the module, students work to answer the Essential Question, “How do windmills change wind to light?” and develop their knowledge of key terms such as energy, speed, and generator.
     
     
   • Outer Space: In Wit & Wisdom Grade 3, Module 2: Outer Space, students discover how our understanding of outer space has changed over time and how beliefs about space have shaped our perceptions of Earth and our ideas about our place in the universe. As students learn about space exploration and gain basic information about the Moon and stars, they also learn to distinguish their own point of view from that of the author of a text and state an opinion clearly, using reasons, based in text, to support that opinion.
     
     Throughout the module, students read informational and literary texts including Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 and Zathura along with supplementary journals, videos, and a speech about the Moon. Students learn words such as revolved, telescope, observations, satellite, lunar, and ascent as they develop knowledge schemas about outer space.
     
     Students encounter outer space again from a scientific perspective in PhD Science Levels 3 and 5. In Level 3, Module 4: Forces and Motion, students study the anchor phenomenon of motion in space. In this module, students learn that forces can cause changes in the motion of objects and that motion can be observed, measured, described, and predicted. Then, in Level 5, Module 4: Orbit and Rotation, students investigate views from Earth and space and explore the apparent motion of astronomical objects. Across these two modules, students gain knowledge of key scientific terms including gravity, motion, force, orbit, moonrise, and celestial.
     
     
   • Extreme Weather: In PhD Science Level K, Module 1: Weather, students study the anchor phenomenon, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, to understand the parts of weather, the effects weather has on people, and the ways people prepare for severe weather. Later in Level 3, Module 1: Weather and Climate, students study the 1900 Galveston, Texas, hurricane and build an answer to the Essential Question, “How can we prevent a storm from becoming a disaster?” This module teaches students to see that weather conditions and severe weather events occur in predictable patterns that remain stable over time as students build a deep understanding of key terms such as forecast, temperature, climate, severe weather, hurricane, precipitation, weather hazard, and season. These concepts and schemas about weather and climate can then anchor new learning about extreme settings in students’ ELA instruction.
     
     In Wit & Wisdom Grade 4, Module 2: Extreme Settings, students explore human responses to challenges presented by nature and build knowledge about aspects of the environment including adverse weather, rugged terrain, wild animals, plants, and more. Students read literary and scientific texts, including Hatchet and SAS Survival Handbook: The Ultimate Guide to Surviving Anywhere, and learn vocabulary words such as extreme, erosion, survival, wilderness, erosion, glacier, Fahrenheit, and eruption.
     
     As students build their content knowledge throughout the module, they also learn how the environment can be expanded through details to become a key story element in a literary text and how to infer emotions felt by the protagonists in each poem and story.

Providing Educators with the Tools for Success

Attending to schemas and the coherent knowledge build of our programs is just one way that the curriculum writers at Great Minds® have applied research on how students best learn. The architecture of the content itself is also supported by the instructional design of each individual lesson, which is guided by a Launch, Learn, Land structure that is consistent across all content areas. Each phase in this structure plays a critical role in activating students’ knowledge schemas, reducing students’ cognitive load, and actively engaging students in building knowledge that stays with them. Learn more about the research behind our curriculum design and see this lesson structure in action.

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Buschkuehl, Martin. “What Are Schemas?” n.d., Mind Research Institute. https://blog.mindresearch.org/blog/schema-in-education. Accessed 26 September 2023.

“Cognitive Load Theory: A Guide to Applying Cognitive Load Theory to Your Teaching.” Medical College of Wisconsin. May 2022. https://www.mcw.edu/-/media/MCW/Education/Academic-Affairs/OEI/Faculty-Quick-Guides/Cognitive-Load-Theory.pdf.

Meta, J. & Fine, S. (2019). In search of deeper learningem>. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, quoted in Stern, Julie. “What Is Schema? How Do We Help Students Build It?” EducationWeek. October 20, 2019. https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-what-is-schema-how-do-we-help-students-build-it/2019/10.

Nickerson, Charlotte. “Schema In Psychology: Definition, Theory, & Examples.” Simply Psychology. May 12, 2023. https://www.simplypsychology.org/what-is-a-schema.html.

Pande, Ishani. “Cognitive Load Theory: Definition, Types, And Applications For Learning.” Cognition Today. August 8, 2022. https://cognitiontoday.com/cognitive-load-theory-definition-types-and-applications-for-learning-guest-post/.

Perera, Ayesh. “Sensory Memory In Psychology: Definition & Examples.” Simply Psychologyem>. July 30, 2023. https://www.simplypsychology.org/sensory-memory.html.

Stern, Julie. “What Is Schema? How Do We Help Students Build It?” EducationWeekem>. October 20, 2019. https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-what-is-schema-how-do-we-help-students-build-it/2019/10.

Willingham, Daniel T. “Why Don’t Kids Like School?” American Educator. Spring 2009. American Federation of Teachers. Accessed 31 August 2022. https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2009/why-dont-students-school.

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