By Cindy Nebel

I went to a bridal shower a couple weeks ago and my aunt challenged me to write a blog post about “our crazy family”. So here you go, Aunt Kathy; this one’s for you…

This bridal shower was for a super sweet woman joining our big, boisterous family and, toward the end of the event, there was this moment where a bunch of us were sitting around talking about the changes that happen to women’s bodies as we get older. I won’t horrify you with the details, but we were all laughing hysterically. And then a couple comments were made that would qualify as “inside jokes” and I noticed myself explaining why the comments were so funny to the new bride – who didn’t find them nearly as hilarious as the rest of the room.

This is a really common occurrence that various friends and newcomers have commented on over the years. Joining my family for a celebration is “an experience” (as my good friend Emily once commented). I always understood this in terms of the number of inside jokes we have and the random traditions that make sense to no one else. For example, if you come for Christmas, you will be assigned trash duty and everyone will throw their wrapping paper at you. You will notice the wall covered in napkins with stickers showing where each one came from, which won’t make much sense. And you will be told to sit on a stepstool in the middle of the room to open your present. You will probably walk away confused.

But my aunt’s challenge made me think of my crazy family through the lens of cognitive psychology. You see, we have a close family. We spend a lot of time together and, because of that shared experience, we have very similar knowledge structures (or schema). We understand how each family member connects concepts because we likely shared many of the experiences that determined those relationships. For example, in my immediate family, there’s this kitchen tool that most people would recognize as a wooden stick used to move a shelf in a hot oven, but in my house? That’s a tool used to pull bowls down from high shelves. This conceptual mapping of “stick” to “reaching” likely doesn’t match anyone else’s beyond my parents and sisters. When a newcomer visits my family for dinner and someone opens a cabinet and says, “Hey can you hand me the stick?” that newcomer is lost. They know the language, but comprehension of the situation is very low.

And this issue of understanding one another is directly related to issues facing educators. In order to effectively communicate with our learners, we need to use their knowledge structures so that they understand our examples. Similarly, if we can effectively leverage the prior knowledge of our learners, we can create more points of connection with that prior knowledge and therefore more possible retrieval cues for the new information (1). This illustration might help to get this point across: imagine that our knowledge is like a dense web of associations (2). The concept of apple is connected to other related concepts like red, teachers, and pie. Red is then connected to firetrucks and hearts, etc. and so we end up with one giant web. When new information comes into the system to be encoded, it will be connected to whatever existing concepts we understand to be related – we create these new connections. You can imagine that a denser web will allow for more connections to related information, while something we don’t really understand won’t have as many connections.

So, coming back to educators… if we have shared schema with our students, that is, if we have similar webs of concepts, then we will be better at developing examples that create more connections for the new knowledge. If we do not understand our learners or their backgrounds it will be much more difficult to anticipate their knowledge structures, the nodes in their webs. We are much less likely to use language, concepts, and examples to explain new knowledge in a way that makes sense to them or that will be easily retrieved later (3).

My advice?

• Get to know your learners. Understand their backgrounds, the experiences they’ve had (or not), and recognize the differences between them. Leverage that knowledge.

• Build shared schema. One of the biggest challenges facing educators is the diversity of their learners. In a classroom where some students may experience food insecurity and others have nannies taking them to museums, it’s challenging to speak to all of them in a way that they will equally benefit. One way to circumvent the differences in background knowledge in learners is to utilize classroom space to develop a shared history. Taking a little time to establish rapport and engage in targeted activities together allows you to use those very experiences for the varied examples used in class.

• Celebrate diversity in backgrounds. Allow your learners to learn from one another. Have them engage in activities where they provide examples of concepts from their own worlds (but be prepared to provide scaffolding and feedback as necessary). Don’t feel as though you have to do all of the schema-building yourself, but utilize activities that allow learners to construct some of their own knowledge structures. Importantly, this type of active knowledge construction works best when the learners already understand some of the basics and may require scaffolding.

In short, knowledge builds on knowledge (4). In order for us to best communicate and develop both understanding and application of the material we are trying to convey, we need to understand what our learners already know so that we can carefully bridge the gap between where they are and where we want them to be.

References:

(1)   Beier, M. E., & Ackerman, P. L. (2005). Age, ability, and the role of prior knowledge on the acquisition of new domain knowledge: Promising results in a real-world learning environment. Psychology and aging, 20(2), 341.

(2)    Chi, M & Koeske, R. D. (1983). Network representation of child’s dinosaur knowledge. Developmental Psychology, 19(1), 29-39.

(3)    Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers' memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16.

(4)    Willingham, D. T. (2006). How knowledge helps: It speeds and strengthens reading comprehension, learning-and thinking. American Educator, 30(1), 30.