◆Advanced organizers (Ausubel)◆

 An Advance Organizer is a frame used by a learner in order to organize and target new knowledge to be learned prior to learning such information. The approach was proposed by Ausubel and there is a famous instruction example based on it. American students who are to learn Buddhism are, in advance, made to recall their knowledge of Christianity, a more familiar religion to them, and they are given an explanation comparing these two religions in a way that XXX of Buddhism is compared to YYY of Christianity. A frame of Christianity which a teacher makes students recall in advance is called an Advance Organizer in contrast with that of Buddhism which a teacher wants students to learn newly. It seems “reasonable" that having an Advance Organizer can “promote" learning when we look at our everyday life where we can better learn something new by comparing it with matters with which we are already familiar. Since many psychological experiments proved that it is more effective to make students recall a frame beforehand than afterwards, such a frame is named Advance Organizer.

 An advance organizer is considered to be effective for a kind of learning called Meaningful Receptive Learning. The Meaningful Learning is not rote learning where students memorize meaningless matters automatically, but leaning which treats matters familiar with students (namely meaningful matters). At the same time, the Learning is not Discovery Learning where students explore and create a frame for themselves with various examples given, but Receptive Learning where they receive and understand correct answers in an organized way. Meaningful Receptive Learning was named by Ausubel. Try to place these above four kinds of learning in an matrix of two rows and two columns?

Links for References

• Advance Organizers, Guides and Tutorials - Free Technology Guides and Tutorials
  
• Creating and Using Advance Organizers for Distance Learning, NETnet (Norteast Texas Consortium

• Meaningful learning (Lecture material of Makio Taira, Miyagi University of Education) [In Japanese]