Learning From Presentations: Advance Organizers

Learning From Presentations: Advance Organizers

Advance organizers may contains many subordinate ideas that can be linked to particular characteristics or things, It serves as an “intellectual scaffolding” to structure the ideas and facts they encounter during the lesson
Take the example…
Kelly Young in introducing denotative and connotative language to students.
He begins by presenting things, actions, and suggest things. He then presents students with a set of short stories, read them, pick out words that have literal or referential meaning, develop lists of words, discuss it, and still developing it, orientation to the model proposed by David Ausubel.
His theory of meaningful verbal learning deals with three concerns:
How knowledge (curriculum content) is organized
How the mind works to process new information (learning)
How teachers can apply these ideas about curriculum and learning when they present new materials to students (instruction)
Goal and Assumptions
To help teachers organize and convey large amounts of information as meaningfully and efficiently as possible in his approach, the teacher is responsible for organizing and presenting what is to be learned. The learner’s primary role is to master ideas and information, whereas inductive approaches lead students to discover and rediscover concepts, the advance organizers provide concepts directly. Interestingly, Ausubel believes that students have to be active constructors of knowledge, but his route is to teach them the metalevel of the disciplines and the metacognitions of instructions, the advance organizer model is designed to strengthen students’ cognitive structures – their knowledge of a particular subject at any given time and how well organized, clear, and stable that knowledge. Ausubel maintains that a person’s existing cognitive structure is the foremost factor governing whether new material will be meaningful and how well it can be acquired and retained, Before we can present new material effectively, we must increase the stability and clarity our students’ structures. Relate to the example from the initial example (1) it is intended to provide the intellectual scaffolding that will enable the students to see objects more clearly Ausubel rejects the notion that learning through listening, watching, or reading is passive or non-meaningful. It can be, but it won’t be if the students’ mind are prepared to receive and process information.
What is meaningful? According to Ausubel, whether or not material is meaningful depends more on the preparation of the learner and on the organization of the material than it does the method of presentation. Organizing information: the structure of the discipline and cognitive structure. According to Ausubel there is a parallel between the subject matter is organized and the way people organize their minds, that is: at the top of each discipline are a number of very broad, abstract concepts that include the more concrete concepts at the lower stages of organization. Ausubel describes the mind as an information-processing and information-storing system. Ausubel maintains that new ideas can be usefully learned and retained only to extent that they can be related to already available concepts.
Implications for curriculum
Ausubel uses two principles, progressive differentiation and integrative reconciliation.
Progressive differentiation means that the most general ideas of the discipline are presented first, followed by a gradual increase in detail.
Integrative reconciliation simply means that new ideas should be consciously related to previously learned content. In other words, the sequence of the curriculum is organized so that each successive learning is carefully related to what has been presented before.


Implications for teaching
Advance organizers purpose to explain, integrate, and interrelate the material in the learning task with previously learned material (and also to help learners discriminate new materials with previously learned materials). The most effective organizers are those that use concepts that are already familiar to learners (illustrations and analogies). There are two types of advance organizers – expository and comparative.
Expository provide a basic concept at the highest level of abstraction and perhaps some lesser concepts. It represents the intellectual scaffold on which students will “hang” as they encounter it. It is helpful for unfamiliar material (e.g. basic concepts of economic after study of economic condition of a city).
Comparative organizers, on the other hand, are typically used with relatively familiar material. They are designed to discriminate between the old and new concepts in order to prevent confusion.