Learning from schema-based instruction

An important consideration in an investigation of schema development is the nature of the first pieces of information relevant to the schema that an individual acquires. Judging from the structure of many textbooks and the outlines of many class lessons, we should pay special attention to two kinds of information available in instruction, namely, examples and definitions. It is these types of information that are typically used in instruction, and it is from them that students will begin to develop their schema knowledge. 

Part of this chapter is a revised description of the research first reported in Marshall (1993 b) and reproduced here with permission of Kluwer Academic Publishers. 

We frequently encounter instructional situations such as this one, and given our interest in the way students learn, we ought to ask immediately about the extent to which schema development is influenced by the type of information used in the instruction. That is, is an individual more likely to create a strong schema when the instruction begins with an example, when it opens with a definition, or when both types of information are presented simultaneously This central question gives rise to several related ones  

The overall objective of this study was to follow a group of students as they moved through the full instructional sequence provided by SPS. The study is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it provides some empirical evidence of what students are learning from the initial instruction, and some interesting and valuable con- 

Subjects were 27 college students recruited from introductory psychology classes. These students had relatively weak problem-solving skills On a pretest of 10 multistep word problems, they averaged four wrong answers. 

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Chapter 7. Learning from schema-based instruction... 

Instruction and learning from instruction have been the topics of the previous two parts. Now, the focus shifts to issues of assessment. To some degree, the ideas offered here have already been introduced, because it has been impossible to discuss the evaluation of learning from schema-based assessment without delving into some of the assessment questions and techniques. These issues are elaborated more fully here. 

An objective of this chapter, and indeed of much of this book, is to illustrate the importance of linking instructional practice and assessment to a theoretical approach. Schema theory provides a new conceptual foundation for the organization of instruction and the subsequent assessment of students learning from it. In this chapter, I discuss some of the theoretical and practical issues involved in using schema-based instruction. In Chapter 5, I describe a functioning instructional system that is schema driven. 

It is useful to consider how schema-based instruction differs from other approaches. One important difference is that schema-based instruction de-emphasizes the quantity of factual bits of information that the student acquires. More is not always better. Factual detail is important, but it is incidental in the development of schema knowledge. It will accrue steadily as part of identification and elaboration knowledge, but it is never the central focus of instruction and learning. The focus is on integrating those facts that are essential rather than on acquiring more and more facts. 

All of the above difficulties in constructing schema-based test items hold for tests developed outside the classroom as well as for those constructed by teachers, and an additional problem is that the developers may be far removed from the actual classroom experience. Thus, there is no guarantee that they hold the same view of learning as do the teachers who guide the instruction. 

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