What is the role of schemas in the solving of knowledge-lean and knowledge-rich problems?
The collection of knowledge surrounding a familiar problem is called problem schema. It characterizes experts who are solving problems in knowledge-rich domains. For routine problem solving, it is usually assumed that experts know a large variety of problem schemas, where a problem schema consists of information about the class of problems the schema applies to and information about their solutions. Thus, schema plays very important role in knowledge-rich problems to differentiate experts and novices. For nonroutine solving problems, there are three conditions: 1) some of the problems have more than one schema is applicable; 2) some of them have not schema to cover the whole problem; 3) a solution procedure can’t be executed. But, all these show that schema-driven problem solving is useful in understanding problem solving. However, this is not always the case, in some task domains schema-driven problem solving does not seem to play a prominent role in expert behavior. In knowledge-lean
