by The Open University
Available in 36 free installments
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Some research from George Mandler (1967) suggests that by organising information we learn it even though we are not making any effort to memorise it. Mandler carried out an experiment where two groups of participants were given a pack of 100 cards each. Each card had a word printed on it. Both groups of participants were told to sort the cards into groups. They were allowed to have several tries at sorting the cards. The only difference between the two groups of participants was that the first group were told to try and memorise the words on the cards while they were sorting them but the other group were only told to sort the cards. When both groups were later tested by being asked to write down all the words they could remember the group who were only told to sort the words remembered as many words as the group who were told to sort and memorise the words.
In the Mandler experiment can you identify the following variables?
the independent variable
the dependent variable
The independent variable is the variable that the experimenter manipulates so this is the instruction to try and memorise the words which was given to one group only.
The dependent variable is the number of words recalled.
You may rightly argue that being able to remember lists of words in category groups is not a particularly useful skill for everyday life. However the principle of organising information so that it is grouped with related items can be applied to activities like reading this unit. You may be aware of mind mapping, which is simply a way of organising information so you can see which items go together and how they are related to other items.
Skim reading is a good way to get an overall idea of what is going to be covered in the material you are looking at. The titles, subtitles, bullet point lists and diagrams can help you see how the material has been organised. Keeping this organisation in mind can be a useful aid to study. You can start out with a rough sketch of how the material is organised and then add to it or amend it as you do your close reading.
We'll now look at a third way of organising our thoughts which is very similar to concept formation but is more extensive, and that is using schemas.
A schema is the word psychologists use to describe a mental framework in which you would file all your knowledge about certain objects, situations, groups of people and even yourself. It would include the whole package of your thinking when you think about something. For example, if you apply concept formation to the word dentist you would probably categorise dentist as an occupation. However if you list everything that you associate with the word dentist this would give you your dentist schema. Your schema may include items such as a waiting room, dread, a dentist's chair, the sound of the drill, the smell of the antiseptic mouth wash and so on.
The term schema (plural schemas or schemata) was used by an influential Swiss psychologist named Jean Piaget. Piaget, who died in 1980, spent over 50 years investigating the way that children developed their thinking or cognitive skills. He proposed that they did this by developing schemas which are built up from their experience of the world.
It is as if your memory is a huge filing cabinet and each file in the cabinet is a schema. If you opened the schema labelled ?going to the cinema?, it would contain all your knowledge about trips to the cinema (e.g. buying a ticket, sitting in the dark, seeing a film, other people around, eating popcorn). If you visited a cinema that you have never been to before you wouldn't have to start from the beginning in trying to work out what to do. You would simply activate your ?going to the cinema? schema to guide your actions. In this way schemas help us deal more efficiently with the world around us so when we encounter a new situation we can apply our knowledge of similar past situations to help us act appropriately.
