Articles:In Defense of Advance Organizers: A Reply to the Critics
From unthinkMedia
This article is primarily a response at various attempts to devalue a previous article written by the author. Some of the criticims include the assumed non-distinction between organizers and overview and various methodological discrepancy accusations. His defense relied on a mixture of poor research of the topic, and poor advance organizer designs used as research instruments.
Bellow are the the supporting arguments, along with some context of what an advanced organizer consist of.
Contents |
The Criticisms
"The most pervasively voiced criticism of advance organizers is that their definition and construction are vague and, therefore, that different researchers have varying concepts of what an organizer is and can only rely on intuition in constructing one-since nowhere, claim the critics, is it specified what their criteria are and how they can be constructed"(Barnes, B. R. & Clawson, 1975; Hartley & Davies, 1976).
"The organizers are reported to contain nothing which could be directly helpful in answering posttest questions. Instead Ausubel believes that organizers facilitate retention in an indirect manner by providing "ideational scaffolding." The weak link in the argument is that none of the studies thus far have included controls to show that the organizer alone does not improve performance. Therefore the possibility remains that the organizers have a direct rather than an indirect effect." (Anderson, 1967, p. 158)
Advance Organizers vs. Overview
Advance Organizers
- introductory material, which compared to the learning passage has higher levels of:
- abstraction
- generality
- inclusiveness
Overview
a summation (minus the specific details) of a content's principal ideas that is not necessarily written at a higher level of abstraction, generality, and inclusiveness
Types of Organizers
expository
When: Learner has no/low-prior knowledge (pre-testing)
What: provides inclusive tidbits of information that are both related to existing ideas in cognitive structure and to the more detailed material in the learning passage.
comparative
When: Learner has some prior knowledge and existing schema models.
What:
- scaffolds the specific details found in a learning passage
- explicitly identifies the principal similarities and differences between them new ideas which will be presented and the previously learned content.
Pedagogic Effectiveness
- conceptual pre-questions yield higher recall and more highly structured memories than conceptual postquestions
- conceptual pre-questions, unlike verbatim post-questions, increase delayed as well as immediate recall
- meaningful post-questions, like advance organizers, tend differentially to facilitate the recall of poor as opposed to good comprehenders
H. L. Barnes (1972) found that organizers have a practically important effect on school learning, based on a study where 98% of the cases an advance organizer resulted in a 10% to 18% increase in mean learning score.
