Feature Articles

School Library Media Activities Monthly/Volume XIII, Number 5/January 2000

Organizers

by Daniel Callison

"Organizers" are tools or techniques that provide identification and classification along with possible relationships or connections among ideas, concepts, and issues. Organizers are useful to the learner when given in advance of instruction and often serve as clues to ideas that the instructor plans to introduce. Such organizers seem to have a positive influence on the learner's ability to focus on new information and may increase the portion that is eventually assimilated as new knowledge for the student.

Organizers also may help to illustrate potential student research topics that derive from brainstorming a given theme. When student ideas are connected through some graphic means, the organization of these often random thoughts may show how eventual student projects will relate and support each other. Such visual mapping of concepts and questions also can illustrate the need for students to be more open and cooperative in the research process as they discover facts and resources that overlap with the information needs of others in the class.

In addition to serving as primers, objectives, outlines, and mental maps, organizers also may prove useful to enhance summaries and conclusions. Here, ranking and rating may enter the process more strongly than in the planning stages as the learner displays new knowledge in the form of conclusions and findings. The learner may have gained enough entry-level expertise not only to organize information, but also to make decisions as to which findings are more important or more relevant than others. Organizing such thoughts in order of importance is one sign that the maturing information literate student is becoming a critical thinker.

Advance Organizers

David Ausubel's research and ideas concerning advance organizers have become fundamental aspects for modern discussions of learning theory. He defined "teaching" as the deliberate guidance of learning processes for the purpose of enhancing learning outcomes. To enhance the instructor's guidance toward meaningful information, Ausubel offered the following proposal as to the power of an effective advanced organizer:

Bruce Joyce and Marsha Weil, co-authors of the classic educational text Models of Teaching, provide one of the more clear descriptions of Ausubel's work and application of his ideas to instructional practice. Joyce and Weil compare and contrast a wide variety of approaches to instruction, each tied to their philosophy, "we teach by creating environments for children" both in and outside the school setting. They believe that the strength in education resides in the intelligent use of this powerful variety of approaches-matching them to different goals and adapting them to the student's styles and characteristics. Competence in teaching stems from the capacity to reach out to differing children and to create a rich and multidimensional environment for each.

Joyce and Weil offer the following scenario to illustrate the use of advance organizers that lead to improving the effectiveness of lectures and other presentations:

The guide then points out examples of one or two changes in these characteristics. She also asks the students to recall their elementary school days and the differences in their drawings when they were five or six, and when they were older. She likens the different periods of growing up to different cultures.

In the tour that follows, as the students look at paintings and sculpture, the docent points out to them the differences that result from changing times. "Do you see here," she says, "how in this painting the body of the person is almost completely covered by his robes, and there is no hint of a human inside his clothes? In medieval times, the church taught that the body was unimportant and that the soul was everything." Later she remarks, "You see in this painting how the muscularity of the man stands out through his clothing and how he stands firmly on the earth. This represents the Renaissance view that man was at the center of the universe and that his body, his mind, and his power were very important indeed."

Much of Ausubel's work was conducted and replicated to support and enhance the effectiveness of the lecture method for instruction. To Ausubel, discovery methods are too time consuming and complex to be dependable methods for learning. Although such approaches can be effective for certain students in certain learning situations, the basic, common, and most efficient instructional approach is for the instructor to convey information to a group of students. The presentation is more effective when it contains advance organizers designed to strengthen students' cognitive structures, or the person's knowledge of a particular subject matter at any given time and how well organized, clear, and stable it is. Ausubel maintained that a person's existing cognitive structure, or set of mental models, is the foremost factor governing whether new material will be meaningful and how well it can be acquired and retained. Before an instructor can present new material effectively, he or she must increase the stability and clarity of the students' prior knowledge.

The strongest advance organizers are those that provide a conceptual framework through which students, with some variety in backgrounds and experiences, each may connect and construct an intellectual scaffold. Through the use of specific models, examples, and analogies, the teacher helps students identify elements of a new concept in concrete ways. The organizer is broad, however, and conceptual in nature so that it provides a large umbrella under which many more specific items can be identified, discussed, and related. The organizer must be new to the audience if learning is to take place. The advance organizer sets a stage for a new experience-one that can be linked to experiences brought to the situation by the students. The effective teacher, in Ausubel's view, directs such linkage. A growing body of modern constructivist theory would suggest, however, that such linkage becomes stronger and more likely to be retained when the students are emerged in a social environment among themselves and the resources in order to build additional linkages for themselves.

The Implications of Ausubel's Theory

Joyce and Weil have summarized implications to educational structures that derive from Ausubel's work.

Curriculum:

• Progressive differentiation. The most general ideas of the discipline are presented first, followed by a gradual increase in detail and specificity.
• Integrative reconciliation. New ideas should be consciously related to previously learned content.

Teaching:

• Expository organizer. Provides a general model for introduction of new facts or ideas, but broad enough to move the learner up a notch or so on the complexities of the material to be learned. Ausubel recommended this type of organizer for completely unfamiliar learning material in which it is necessary to furnish an expository organizer consisting of more inclusive or superordinate ideas that could subsume or provide anchorage for the new material.
• Comparative organizer. Provides a more specific model closer to that which is already familiar and very similar to concepts just mastered. Ausubel recommended this approach for introduction of relatively familiar learning material, organized along parallel lines to that already held by the learner, but designed to increase discriminability between new and existing ideas, to refine differences with precision and detail.

Webbing: Organizing Information and Ideas

Organizing techniques have always been effective for teachers who want to bring meaning out of information overflow and sort out misinformation and irrelevant information. Kay Vandergrift, professor of library and information science at Rutger's, gives attention to a specific technique,"webbing," in her guide to the teaching role of the school library media specialist. A web may be a visual representation of different subsets of names, events, concepts, or questions related to a more general topic or theme. A web may serve as a visual representation of characters, events, conflicts, and new vocabulary with a novel serving as the center for the web and one result being identification of additional similar books to spark young reader interest. The web may have been constructed by professional educators as a guide to illustrate the wide choice of topics possible for a given theme. For student research topics, exploration of basic classification systems such as Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress can provide, to some degree, the "lay of the land" for organized information. Textbook outlines, tables of contents, and glossaries sometimes provide the same initial, but expertly formal, approach.

The more effective approach, supported by Vandergrift, is to use webbing as an engaging technique to bring students into the creation of the research agenda. Students brainstorm expressions of experiences, events, and questions, and place these ideas on a large board or overhead. No initial judgment is made as to value or relevance, although as items are clustered and related, students begin to see that some subtopics offer more potential depth than others. Some see webbing as a free-flowing outline that allows ideas to be expressed and captured without the constraints of an ordered progression. Webbing seems to work best with groups of students as they are encouraged to express ideas for themselves and for peers to learn of the variety of possibilities for their classmates. Formal outlining, however, will eventually have its place in the research process, especially in the presentation stage that requires judgment and order.

Vandergrift reminds us that large-group semantic webbing is a triggering device that will need to be followed by continued background reading and likely a series of webs created by the individual student before he or she gains focus for the project. "They reconsider what they already know, identify what they want to find out, and formulate specific research questions or hypotheses. Even if a teacher has assigned the broad topic, this activity can help students see possibilities within that topic, encourage their personal ownership and involvement with the assigned task and, most importantly, get them excited both about what they already know and what is yet to be known."

The KWL Table, created by Donna Ogle and illustrated by James Bellanca in his collection of graphic organizers for cooperative thinking, has become a common tool for students to individually map their research agenda. By using this simple three-column structure, the students list what they Know, Want to learn, and have Learned. The visual organizer again helps students see relationships, but also helps learners see personal progress and initiates self-evaluation.

Graphic Organizers

Leticia Ekhaml, professor of research at State University of West Georgia, has described how graphic organizers have recently evolved from traditional charts and tables to specific designs associated with different tasks in problem-solving and critical thinking. Some of the benefits of such organizers listed by Ekhaml include:

• see connections, patterns, and relationships
• facilitate recalling or retelling of literature
• rank ideas
• list causes and effects
• improve comprehension skills and strategies

Ekhaml, based on Bellanca's cooperative think tank ideas, illustrates four basic patterns for graphic organizers: sequential, conceptual, hierarchical, and cyclical. Although each of these organizers is likely to be more formal than the less structured brainstorming, such as webbing, each represents an effective visualization of showing steps, decision points, relationships, and rankings. Creating visuals that personalize such organizers may well be a new trend in summaries and visual presentations we will expect from students as they demonstrate their information literacy skills. Visual organizers can convey the core of the essential or critical message that student researchers are expected to discover.

For Further Reading

• Ausubel, David P. Learning Theory and Classroom Practice. Bulletin No. 1. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1967.
• Bellanca, James. The Cooperative Think Tank: Graphic Organizers to Teach Thinking in the Cooperative Classroom. Palantine, IL: Skylight Publishing, 1990.
• Bellanca, James. The Cooperative Think Tank II: Graphic Organizers to Teach Thinking in the Cooperative Classroom. Palantine, IL: Skylight Publishing, 1992.
• Clarke, John H. "Using Visual Organizers to Focus on Thinking." Journal of Reading 34, no. 7: 526-534.
• Dunston, Pamela J. "A Critique of Graphic Organizer Research." Reading Research and Instruction 31, no. 2: 57-65.
• Ekhaml, Leticia. "Graphic Organizers: Outlets for Your Thoughts." School Library Media Activities Monthly 14, no. 5 (January 1998): 29-33.
• Hoyt, Linda. Revisit, Reflect, Retell: Strategies for Improving Reading Comprehension. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999.
• Johnson, Linda Lee. "Learning Across the Curriculum with Creative Graphing." Journal of Reading 32, no. 6 (March 1989): 509-519.
• Joyce, Bruce, and Marsha Weil. Models of Teaching. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980.
• Vandergrift, Kay E. Power Teaching: A Primary Role for the School Library Media Specialist. Chicago: American Library Association, 1994.