schema

A schema is the mind's ready-made shape for a kind of experience — the frame that tells you what to look for before you look, so a familiar room is found in the dark by reaching for the light switch where it always is.

Bartlett gave the word its modern sense: a schema organises perception and memory around past experience, and what does not fit the frame is noticed less, remembered worse, or bent until it does. A schema guides attention (the eye looks for what the name points to) and consolidates memory (the label organises what was already seen). In the expertise literature, the expert's edge is a richer schema — more connections, more accessible categories, more articulable criteria — which is why the expertise reversal effect says instruction that helps a novice build schemas becomes redundant once the expert has them. In when-the-trade-flips, the scaffold's job is to build the schema the novice lacks; in gap-predicts-teaching, the schema-rich expert's narrow tacit-cost gap is what makes them the better teacher. The schema is the explicit layer's architecture: the thing that can be named, demonstrated, and transferred — the opposite of the tacit production that fires without passing through working memory.