ABSTRACT
The first point to note is that what children learn in the classroom will depend to a large extent on what they already know. Irrespective of their age, children will have some knowledge and some conception of the classroom topic they are faced with, which they have acquired from books, television, talking to parents and friends, visits to places of interest, previous work in school, and so on. However, these conceptions, or schemata as they are generally called, are likely to be incomplete, hazy or even plain wrong. They are, nevertheless, the children’s current ideas, which they use to make sense of everyday experiences. In other words, children do not come to any lesson empty-headed; they come with partial schemata. For example, a top junior teacher we observed recently asked her class, ‘What are clouds made of?’ The responses were many and varied. Some thought they were made of smoke, some had fuzzy notions about them being made over the sea, but they were unclear of the process. On the other hand, another child, the son of a local meteorologist, was able to talk about evaporation and had a clear schema of the water cycle. There was, then, tremendous variation in the schemas held by the children in that class. The teacher’s job there, as in any classroom, was to find effective ways of modifying, extending or elaborating the children’s schemata. Indeed, we can define learning in these terms as the extension, modification or elaboration of existing cognitive schemas.
