Schema Theory

The purpose of the Anderson article was to inform us about schema theory. Reading comprehension isn’t concrete and imaginable. A person’s schema forms relationships among story elements to comprehend text. A child’s schema is based on the culture they’re born and raised in. The comprehension of text varies person to person because of this. I notice this sometimes myself in conversation among friends. I was raised in a rural environment whereas my friends from Philly grew up in an urban environment. I once said to my roommate, “The milk is all.” She replied, “All what?” I meant the milk was all gone, but she had no idea what I was talking about. Back home, my family would know I was saying the milk was empty. That’s more of an example of language comprehension, but still touched on our schema.

Reading involves simultaneous analysis at different levels. It also requires us to do six different skills such as putting information into a “slot,” paying close attention to text, making inferences, memory recall, summarizing important information, and creating hypotheses about missing information. Schema is based on perspective which relates to a child’s culture. For example, my students and I came across the word beaker in a story. Upon showing them one on Google images they still had no idea what it was used for so I explained it, and we watched a Youtube video of one being used. When we came across the word culvert students also didn’t know what one was. When I showed them this they said they’ve seen one down the block. One student even mentioned a homeless guy living in one. I teach predominantly African-American children so our schemas are very different, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. We have some of the best conversations and teachable moments because of it.

Moving forward, I hope to spend more time introducing books to my class before we read them to gauge what they know. I currently encourage my students to make predictions when we’re done shared reading each day. I hope to get a better feel for what they know before reading instead of during reading so I can help them more when it comes to what they need to learn. I liked the sentence toward the end of the article about minority students failing comprehension of reading material because their schema doesn’t match majority of the culture. I think these students comprehend in a different way so as teachers we have to be open minded to hearing what they interpreted and work on building their schema.