The metabolic versatility of bacteria is a source of learning difficulty for students in classical microbiology courses. To facilitate the learning process, the authors developed an advance organizer. It consists of a set of six diagrams of metabolic pathways describing the basic living requirements of several types of bacteria: energy, carbon…

Cognitive load can be defined as the amount of mental effort that performing a specific task imposes on a learner's cognitive system. It can be measured by the number of new concepts embedded in a learning task. English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, with their limited English proficiency and minimal entry knowledge of a subject matter,…

Two experiments investigated to what extent schema activation is involved in any facilitative effect that headings may have on multiple-choice test performance following the reading of a passage. In the first experiment, 1,116 college students read a 1,760-word passage on human sexuality with headings either present or absent. An analysis of the…

The paper reports on a study of Braille learning in which subjects (N=96) were provided with information about the structure of the Braille alphabet and expressly instructed to use that information during learning. A previous experiment had found that merely providing subjects with information about Braille alphabet structure had no effect on…

To discover if narrative analogies of scientific mechanisms would help readers to comprehend passages describing those mechanisms, four such passages were extracted from an encyclopedia. These original passages were written in expository style and constituted the expository condition. For the narrative condition, simple narrative analogies of…

Described is a study in which 137 undergraduate co-ed students were randomly assigned printed introductory material to the graphical analysis of straight line kinematics. One type of introduction was the traditional form and the other an advanced organizer. Students in three sections worked through printed programs and those in the other three…

This study was designed to determine whether advance organizers in the form of visual aids might serve the same function as Ausubel's verbal advance organizers. The basic design of the study consisted of a 4 X 3 X 2 ANOVA factorial design. Ninety-six eighth-grade students were involved in the study. One group was exposed to a physiographic diagram…

In this third Occasional Paper in the Science series of The Science and Mathematics Education Information Analysis Center, Ausubel explains the nature and theoretical rationale of "organizers", abstract, general, and inclusive statements presented prior to new learning tasks to provide specific relevant anchoring ideas in the learner's…

This report provides an overview of concept and principle-learning studies and traces the theoretical basis for schema theory, which asserts that all knowledge is assimilated into a general cognitive framework. The procedures of an original study are described, which was designed to test the hypothesis that the inclusion of a "domain…

This study investigated whether giving students generic advance instructions about how to learn classification tasks was effective in facilitating learning of a specific classification task. Results showed that the instruction group and adjunct-questions group did equally well on classifying new and old instances of U.S. Navy call signs.…

Performance of engineering students taught with behavioral objectives is compared to performance of similar students taught with advance organizers. Since results indicate little difference in achievement, subsequent work will be directed toward finding possible links between personality types (measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) and…

Defines information mapping, illustrates its techniques, and compares its techniques with those employed in programed instruction. (HOD)

Reports the results of a study of 10th grade students that showed their comprehension improved when slash marks were used to divide the text into meaningful phrases. (AEA)

Investigated the theory that meaningful learning of new material could be facilitated through the use of relevant subsuming concepts (organizers) presented prior to the message. Hypothesized that these advance organizers would be superior to introductory overviews. No overall advance organizer superiority was found. (PD)