In Defense of Advance Organizers: A Reply to the Critics

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). If these critics had read my books on meaningful verbal learning and on educational psychology (1963, 1968) we well as my research articles, they would have found precise operational criteria for an advance organizer and a discussion of how to construct one. Apart from describing organizers in general terms with an appropriate example, one cannot be more specific about the construction of an organizer; for this always depends on the nature of the learning material, the age of the learner, and his degree of prior familiarity with the learning passage. From the exhaustive and explicit general discussion of the definition, nature, and effects of an organizer in various publications (Ausubel, 1960; Ausubel & Fitzgerald, 1961, 1962; Ausubel & Youssef, 1963; Fitzgerald & Ausubel, 1963), plus the description of how to construct an