From stereotyped recognition to situated meaning: university students' retrospective accounts of perceived schema revision in learning Jiaxing revolutionary heritage.

This qualitative interview study examines how university students retrospectively narrate perceived schema revision in learning Jiaxing revolutionary heritage, a politically and culturally saturated local heritage context associated with South Lake and the Red Boat. Schema revision was used as a sensitizing analytical lens rather than as a direct measure of cognitive change. Thirty Mandarin interview transcripts from students with varied learning experiences were analyzed through a hybrid deductive-inductive codebook thematic analysis conducted by three coders. Participants commonly recalled exam-oriented, official-slogan, tourism/local-familiarity, professional-irrelevance, and cross-cultural-untranslatability schemas. They associated perceived meaning reconstruction with concrete people, local scenes, material artifacts, digital or visual media, mediating persons, and disciplinary entry points. Narrated reconstructions were often more humanized, contextualized, professionally relevant, and audience-aware, but remained partial and conditional. Evidence was strongest for changes in perceived relevance, interpretation, and explainability, not for verified real-time cognitive restructuring. The study therefore offers a provisional interpretive account of remembered learning pathways and design hypotheses for psychologically responsive, audience-sensitive heritage education.