Do Advance Organizers Facilitate Learning? Recommendations for Further Research Based on an Analysis of 32 Studies

Written materials are now and are likely to remain an important resource in the classroom. A perennial concern of educators is the preparation and use of materials that are organized in such way as to maximize learning. David P. Ausubel, in his theory of meaningful verbal learning, advocates the use of advance organizers to facilitate the learning of written materials. The purpose of the organizer, according to Ausubel (1963, p. 23), is to relate the potentially meaningful materials to be learned to the already existing cognitive structure of the learner. It is his assumption that the learner's cognitive structure is organized hierarchically in terms of highly inclusive conceptual traces under which are subsumed less inclusive subconcepts as well as specific informational data. Based on this assumption, Ausubel (1963) recommends that advance organizers be written at a higher level of abstraction, generality, and inclusiveness than the learning task itself