Schemas and their role in learning

What exactly are schemas and why should teachers know about them?  We learn about retrieval practice, metacognition, cognitive load, working memory and many other cognitive theories and underpinning pretty much all of them are schemas.  It is the way that we theorise about how knowledge is stored in, linked and retrieved from long-term memory and so therefore we need to understand not only what they are but how to move our students from novice schema to expert schema.  In this episode we will look at different ways that this can be done and reflect on some best practice.  There are lots of previous episodes that link to schema that can be found via this link.