Describe, using a relevant study, schema theory.

Schema theory suggests that all knowledge is organised into units based on previous experiences and factors such as childhood experiences, repetitive exposure and reinforcement.
Bartlett's 1932 study investigated whether people’s memory for a story is affected by previous knowledge (schemas). Bartlett asked British participants to read a culturally unfamiliar Native American story called 'war of the ghosts' and recall it over a period of days, months or years. Bartlett found that participants remembered the main idea of the story but ·    changed unfamiliar elements to make sense of the story by using terms more familiar to their own cultural expectations. 
Conclusion: culturally unfamiliar details were changed and fit into pre-existing culturally familiar schemas in order to be retained. Bartlett's schema theory explains how we store and organic knowledge for easier recall.