Schema Theory

The schema theory was developed by linguists, cognitive psychologists, and psycholinguists in an effort to explain how the brain functions mainly in terms of understanding and organizing information for storage and remembrance. The theory postulates that all knowledge stored in the brain is grouped and stored in units called schema. The process through which schema develops in the human brain has not been fully comprehended with different speculations among scientists. However, three theories regarding schema seem to be generally accepted within academia. First of all, many psychologists agree that schemata are preexisting structures of knowledge that have been stored in the mind. Moreover, the idea that comprehension is a process of mapping the information from the text into these preexisting knowledge structures within the mind is widely accepted. Each newly learned information is added to a schema relating to it. Finally, many agree that knowledge-based processes are predictive and reader-driven. A schema is basically an organized unit of knowledge that represents concepts, objects, and how they relate to a certain subject or event based on past learning experiences.