Describe what psychologists mean by the terms schema, and script, and illustrate each of these concepts with a concrete exampl

Not only do schemas provide a means for organizing information, but they also influence how we interpret new situations. As an example, try the following exercise.

Read the following passage one time only.

John was feeling bad today so he decided to go see the family doctor. He checked in with the doctor's receptionist, and then looked through several medical magazines that were on the table be his chair. Finally the nurse came and asked him to take off his clothes. The doctor was very nice to him. He eventually prescribed some pills for John. Then John left the doctor's office and headed home.

You probably had not trouble understanding the passage because you have been to a doctor's office yourself and have a schema for how those visits usually go. You can therefore fill in a number of details that the passage doesn't ever tell you. For example, you probably inferred that John must have gone to the doctor's office, although the story omits this essential step. Likewise, you probably concluded that John took his clothes off in the examination room, not in the waiting room, even though the story never makes it clear where John did his striptease. When a schema involves a predictable sequence of events related to a particular activity, as is the case in a visit to the doctor's office, it is sometimes called a script.

As teachers, we need to find out whether students have the appropriate schemas and scripts-the organized bodies of knowledge about specific topics and events-to understand and construct new subjects we are presenting to them. When our students don't have such knowledge, we may sometimes need to 'back up" and help them develop it before we forge full-steam ahead with new material. In order to be able to construct new knowledge presented to them, students must first have the proper understanding of the appropriate background knowledge.