ACA Distance Educator's ToolKit
Advance Organizers
As a live instructor, you have probably given a brief overview of material before venturing into new territory with your students, or tried to make the material relevant to your students by telling a story, or pointed out something they should be listening for during the lecture ahead. These are simple examples of advance organizers given before expository instruction. In the ACA distance education model, advance organizers need to take a concrete form to assist the distance learner through each unit or chapter. As an analogy, think of advance organizers as a more complete form of syllabus for each unit or chapter.
Advance organizers and their effectiveness can best be explained by the Modern Cognitivist perspective, including memory mapping, and cognitive frameworks. This school of thought has changed dramatically from Vygotsky and Piaget's work with young children of eight decades ago. Today, there is a body of research we can draw from that is focused on adult learning— a body that employs models that are significantly different than the learning models for young children.
Justification:
Unless you are actively reading research journals that focus on adult learning, you may be asking yourself, "What specifically are Advance Organizers and why do I need to use them?" In 1968, David Ausebel developed the concept of advance organizers as a means to help students place new information into meaningful contexts, or cognitive frameworks. Memories and knowledge are more likely to be stored in a retrievable form when they are interwoven with prior knowledge at the time of storage. In addition, research has consistently demonstrated that well constructed advance organizers promote the application of learned information to new situations (Mayer, 1987).
Advance Organizers usually contain the following three components:
- Expository Organizer: An expository organizer provides a brief outline of the material that will be presented, and in particular how unit topics relate to one another. This is to assist the student in forming an internal mental organization. Sometimes this is a flow-chart graphic.
- Comparative Organizer: A comparative organizer tries to establish a connection between new material and prior knowledge or experience of the student. This is intended to act as a guide for helping students develop cognitive frameworks rather than discrete memorization of facts. Sometimes these take the form of analogies, examples, or thought provoking questions. A list of prerequisite knowledge required of the learner before beginning the unit is a commonly included component.
- Learning Objectives: This will be a list of what knowledge the student should be able to demonstrate after completing the unit. Predefined goals assist distance learners along a learning path.
Additional Components:
Advance organizers will often include other tools to assist the learner through the unit. Sometimes pointers are included to help students look for specific knowledge items that will be prerequisite for later units. Additionally, many distance educators will include a simple assessment rubric within a unit's advance organizer. An example of a simple assessment rubric would be a breakdown of points for exercises within the unit. Some professors have even included recommended minimum time allocations to each unit component in order to assist students with time management.
Ausebel, D. (1968). Educational Psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Mayer, R. E. (1987). Educational Psychology: A cognitive approach. Boston: Little, Brown.
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