Wouldn't you agree that helping students make meaningful connections between what they know and what is to be learned would facilitate learning new ideas? An advance organizer is a device that teachers use to help students make these connections. Advance organizers are frameworks for helping students understand what is to be learned.
An advance organizer is not an overview, but rather a presentation of information (either verbal or visual) that are "umbrellas" for the new material to be learned. The concept of advance organizer was proposed by the psychologist David Ausubel. To Ausubel, effective advance organizers are presented by teachers at a "higher level of abstraction, generality, and incisiveness" than the science material that is to follow.
Advance organizers can be useful devices at the start of a unit, before a discussion, before a question-answer period, before giving a homework assignment, before student reports, before a video, before students read from their science textbook, before a hands-on activity, and before a discussion of science concepts based on student's laboratory experiences.
Let's look at some examples of advance organizers, and then have you consider designing some of your own.
• A teacher shows a picture of Mendeleev in his laboratory in Leningrad and discusses his contribution to the development of the periodic table before introducing any of the details of the table of the elements.• A teacher has students bring in pictures that show the destruction caused by the 1989 San Francisco area earthquake (or any earthquake) before introducing earthquake waves and how they are measured.
• The teacher discusses the origin of life on the Earth before introducing Darwin's theory of evolution.
• The teacher shows a poster depicting many forms of energy and asks students to discuss and identify the examples of energy before introducing the students to a new unit on heat energy.
Advance organizers help the students organize the conceptual knowledge they are to learn. The teacher can refer back to the organizer and use it to link a sequence of lessons.
For example, the science textbook can provide clues and examples of advance organizers. Look at a secondary science textbook and identify advance organizers for one of the chapters in the book. Discuss the advance organizers with a peer in your class. Do they meet the criteria of being "at a higher level of abstraction, generality and inclusiveness," than the materials in the chapter?