CIPRES, MABELLE A.

BSED-ENGLISH 3

TOPIC:
1. ADVANCE ORGANIZERS
2. APPLICATION OF PRINCIPLES

Objectives:
1. Define what an advance organizer is,
2. Identify the purpose(s) of advance organizers and
3. Identify the various ways in which advance organizers can be utilized)

Advance Organizer is a tool used to introduce the lesson topic and illustrate the relationship
between what the students are about to learn and the information they have already learned.

Advance Organizer are also:

• more effective when the learner lacks prior knowledge on the subject matter
• used to promote knowledge transfer
• used as an organizational tool
• more efficient when used if the goal of instruction is the transfer of learning to new
problems

There are three basic purposes of advance organizers.

 First, they direct students' attention to what is important in the upcoming lesson.
 Second, they highlight relationships among ideas that will be presented.
 Third, they remind students of relevant information that they already have.

TYPES OF ADVANCE ORGANIZERS

Expository organizers are used primarily for new and unfamiliar learning material. For
example, Dee Ann Gillies tested the use of expository organizers in the form of short statements
outlining unifying concepts related to information presented during lectures with students
enrolled in an introductory course in medical surgical nursing. The study found improved
learning and short-term retention of material. 

Narrative organizers use a story structure to convey information. A story might illustrate

something about course content through analogy or by turning key concepts into characters and
building detail and narrative to help students recall key information (see, for example, Sketchy’s
study guides sketchy.com). 

Skimming is when the teacher provides the learners with the opportunity to skim over the
information that is about to be introduced, focusing on highlighted information (headings).

Know-Wonder-Learn (KWL) is an advanced organizer that helps both instructor and student
access background knowledge. Students are asked to complete the first two columns prior to
instruction and to share what they have written. The final column can be filled in for reflection or
submission.

(https://teaching.vt.edu/content/dam/teaching_vt_edu/resources/Advance%20Organizers.pdf)
 
Graphic organizers constitute the biggest category of Advance Organizers and can take a wide
variety of forms, including tables, venn diagrams, flow charts and concept maps. They can be
used to help students see connections between concepts, the steps in a process or sequence of
events or simply to organize students’ thinking before, during or after instruction.
 
Examples:
(Barkley, Elizabeth F.. Interactive Lecturing: A Handbook for College Faculty, John Wiley &
Sons, Incorporated, 2018: 242. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/templeuniv-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5254245.)
Application of Principles

Subsumption Theory (David Ausubel)

Ausubel’s theory is concerned with how individuals learn large amounts of meaningful material
from verbal/textual presentations in a school setting (in contrast to theories developed in the
context of laboratory experiments). According to Ausubel, learning is based upon the kinds of
superordinate, representational, and combinatorial processes that occur during the reception of
information. A primary process in learning is subsumption in which new material is related to
relevant ideas in the existing cognitive structure on a substantive, non-verbatim basis. Cognitive
structures represent the residue of all learning experiences; forgetting occurs because certain
details get integrated and lose their individual identity.

A major instructional mechanism proposed by Ausubel is the use of advance organizers:

“These organizers are introduced in advance of learning itself, and are also
presented at a higher level of abstraction, generality, and inclusiveness; and since the
substantive content of a given organizer or series of organizers is selected on the basis of
its suitability for explaining, integrating, and interrelating the material they precede, this
strategy simultaneously satisfies the substantive as well as the programming criteria for
enhancing the organization strength of cognitive structure.”

 Ausubel emphasizes that advance organizers are different from overviews and summaries
which simply emphasize key ideas and are presented at the same level of abstraction and
generality as the rest of the material. Organizers act as a subsuming bridge between new
learning material and existing related ideas.

 Ausubel’s theory has commonalities with Gestalt theories and those that involve schema
(e.g., Bartlett< ) as a central principle. There are also similarities with Bruner’s “spiral
learning” model , although Ausubel emphasizes that subsumption involves reorganization
of existing cognitive structures not the development of new structures as constructivist
theories suggest. Ausubel was apparently influenced by the work of Piaget on cognitive
development.

Application
Ausubel clearly indicates that his theory applies only to reception (expository) learning in school
settings. He distinguishes reception learning from rote and discovery learning; the former
because it doesn’t involve subsumption (i.e., meaningful materials) and the latter because the
learner must discover information through problem solving. A large number of studies have been
conducted on the effects of advance organizers in learning (see Ausubel, 1968, 1978).

Example
Ausubel (1963, p. 80) cites Boyd’s textbook of pathology as an example of progressive
differentiation because the book presents information according to general processes (e.g.,
inflammation, degeneration) rather than by describing organ systems in isolation. He also cites
the Physical Science Study Committee curriculum which organizes material according to the
major ideas of physics instead of piece-meal discussion of principle or phenomenon (p. 78).

Principles
The most general ideas of a subject should be presented first and then progressively
differentiated in terms of detail and specificity.
Instructional materials should attempt to integrate new material with previously presented
information through comparisons and cross-referencing of new and old ideas.

References
1. Ausubel, D. (1963). The Psychology of Meaningful Verbal Learning. New York: Grune
& Stratton.
2. Ausubel, D. (1978). In defense of advance organizers: A reply to the critics. Review of
Educational Research, 48, 251-257.
3. Ausubel, D., Novak, J., & Hanesian, H. (1978). Educational Psychology: A Cognitive
View (2nd Ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.