Where did the concept of a schema come from?
Frederic Bartlett, in 1932, first introduced the concept of the schema while working on constructive memory. He considered schemas a part of top-down processing. According to psybox.com (2002), Bartlett considered schemas to be “maps or structures of knowledge stored in the long-term memory.” (3) Although there may be some debate over the origin of the concept of the schema, some suggest that Piaget first introduced it in 1926, the fact remains that Piaget believed humans develop through a series of qualitative stages built upon common knowledge he called schemas. In other words, a schema is a picture of what we know about life at a particular point in time. As a child develops, he tends to interprete experiences based on what he already knows; what his schema tells him. Piaget referred to this process of making the world fit into our schema as assimilation. If the experience does not fit into our model of knowledge, we begin to modify our schema. Piaget referred to this as accomodatio
