Chapter 6, page 75
class about the ancient Sumerian civilization. The student has no prior schemas for ancient Sumer or for
ancient civilizations. However, the student does have many relevant conceptions for understanding ancient
Sumer—conceptions about cities and rural areas, trade and money, kings and wars, religions with many
gods (such as Rome and Greece), and buildings and technology. If the student activates some or all of
these prior conceptions, she can use these conceptions to help her understand what she is learning in the
video (Spiro, Vispoel, Schmitz, Samarapungavan, & Boerger, 1987).
The important lesson is that people can use consistent prior conceptions to understand a novel
situation, even though they lack a schema that already fits that novel situation. This will be true for many
novel topics that you are teaching in the future. Even if your students lack ready-made schemas, they may
have a variety of different consistent conceptions that they can bring together to help them understand a
novel topic.
Implications for Instruction
Research on consistent conceptions has yielded four very useful teaching techniques for helping
students make effective use of consistent prior conceptions when they are learning new material. Teachers
who regularly employ the following techniques will help their students learn more effectively.
Help students activate prior conceptions. Because students do not automatically activate prior
conceptions even when they have them, teachers can help students learn more by prompting them to
activate those conceptions before they begin learning new material. One way to do this is through the
technique of K-W-L (Jonson, 2005; Ogle, 1986). Teachers using K-W-L ask students to tell or write
down what they Know, what they Want to know, and what they have Learned after they have studied the
new material. Figure 6.3 presents an example of an eighth grader who has filled out a K-W-L sheet before
and after a weeklong unit on poetry.
Another straightforward way to activate prior conceptions is to hold a discussion about an
upcoming topic. For instance, before beginning a unit on the desert, a third-grade teacher could lead a
discussion about what students know about the desert. The teacher could highlight students’ prior
conceptions by writing them on the chalkboard or by creating a concept map that shows interlinked
concepts such as climate (dry and often hot), animal life (with different species listed), and plant life (with
cactus and other species listed).