Advance Organizers Promote Learning

Bill Blynt
Aug 24, 2009

An Advance Organizer is an organizational framework that teachers present to students to prepare them for what they are about to learn prior to teaching new content.  First introduced in the 1960's by Dr. David P. Ausubel, an Advance Organizer is a cognitive instructional strategy used to promote the learning and retention of new information.  Advance Organizers are introduced in advance of the learning itself.  These organizers are used by students to organize and interpret new information and connect it with prior knowledge.

As the mind arranges and stores information, new information is filed into an existing framework of categories. This series of categories is commonly referred to as schemas.  Each of these schemas contains specific information about different concepts. This is often referred to as ‘prior knowledge'.  If no framework (or prior knowledge) exists for students on which to connect this new information, learning and retention can be extremely impacted.  Providing an Advance Organizer to students, especially those with limited prior knowledge, gives them a way to make sense of new information.  Advance Organizers help students organize new material by outlining, arranging and sequencing the main idea of the new material.  Students use the organizer as they confront new information so it can be retained for recall and transfer.

According to Dr Ausubel, "The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows."  When confronted with students having limited or no prior knowledge regarding a concept to be taught, it becomes the responsibility of the teacher to do all they can to bridge this gap.  Advance Organizers provide the necessary scaffolding for students to either learn new and unfamiliar material or to integrate new ideas into relatively familiar ideas.  Much of the research on advance organizers indicates that organizers work especially well with students having limited or no prior knowledge (Mayer 2003).  Much of this same research supports the position that Advance Organizers can be a useful tool in improving the depth of understanding and recall in all students.

Advance Organizers do not need to be complex.  They do need to be clear and directly related to their purpose.  Care should be taken to teach students the organizer and its intended purpose prior to using it with new content.  Once students understand the organizer, they can use it to organize new information presented.  This aids the process of transforming knowledge and applying it in new situations.  It also facilitates the process to embed the new information into long term memory.  Using Advance Organizers, such as LEARNING-FOCUSED's Student Learning Map, that are aligned to the intended outcome on a consistent and pervasive basis can have a dramatic impact on raising the achievement levels of students in your school.