Why are these important?
 Focuses on enhancing students’ ability to retrieve, use,
and organize information about a topic
What exactly are they?
 Cues: explicit reminders or hints about what students
are about to experience.
 Questions: perform the same function as cues by
triggering students’ memories and helping them
access prior knowledge.
 Advance Organizers: structures that teachers provide
before the learning activity to help them focus on and
make sense of the topic being presented.
Generalizations
 Focus on what is important rather than what is
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unusual
“Higher-level” questions produce deeper learning
Advance organizers are most useful with information
that is not well organized
Waiting briefly before accepting student responses can
increase the depth of students’ answers
Questions asked before a learning experience can be
effective learning tools
Recommendations
 Use expository advance organizers
 Use narrative advance organizers
 Teach skimming as a form of advance organizers
 Teach how to use graphic advance organizers
 Make cues explicit
 Ask questions that lead to inferences
 Ask analytic questions
Types of Advance Organizers
 Expository: brochures, definitions, rubrics, and
programs
 Narrative: stories, articles, artistic works
 Graphic: tables, charts, artistic works
 Word processing programs are well suited to create
advance organizers
Explicit Cues
 Straightforward, provide students with a preview of
what they are about to learn
 Students have a clearer sense
Using Multimedia
 Very effective because it helps them both activate prior
knowledge and develop a mental model to help them
understand new information
 Applies to many learning styles:
 Auditory learners are able to listen to things many times
 Visual learners use the pictures and videos
 Kinesthetic learners can use the motion in videos to help
them picture concepts
 Examples: photographs, video clips, blogs
Multimedia Resources
 United Streaming – www.unitedstreaming.com
 The Internet Archive – www.archive.org
 Google Video – http://video.google.com
 A9 – http://a9.com
 Creative Commons – http://creativecommons.org