Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
المؤلف:
Jane D. Hill Kathleen M. Flynn
المصدر:
Classroom Instruction that works with English Language Learners
الجزء والصفحة:
P7-C1
2025-09-01
332
Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
By using cues, questions, and advance organizers, teachers enhance students’ ability to retrieve, use, and organize what they already know about a topic. In other words, these techniques help activate prior knowledge.
The research offers four generalizations about cues and questions:
1. Cues and questions should focus on the information that is critical to students’ understanding of the topic at hand, rather than on what is unusual or interesting about the topic. Focusing on the unusual may heighten student interest for the moment, but it will also distract from the important information that needs to be grasped.
2. Higher-level questions (i.e., those that require analytic thinking) produce deeper learning than lower-level questions (i.e., those that simply require students to recall or recognize information).
3. Waiting briefly before accepting responses from students increases the depth of the answers, leads to more classroom discussion, and facilitates student-to-student interaction.
4. Teachers can use questions effectively both before and after a learning experience. Using questions before a learning experience helps students develop a framework for processing the information.
A somewhat similar set of generalizations applies to the use of advance organizers:
1. Advance organizers should focus on what is important as opposed to what is unusual.
2. Higher-level advance organizers produce deeper learning than lower-level advance organizers.
3. Advance organizers are most useful to students when the information presented is not well organized.
4. Different types of advance organizers produce different results. There are four types of advance organizers:
a. Expository advance organizers are straightforward descriptions of the new content students will be learning. (The research shows that expository organizers are the most effective of the four types.)
b. Narrative advance organizers are stories.
c. Skimming advance organizers involve focusing on and noting what stands out in headings, subheadings, and high-lighted information.
d. Graphic advance organizers visually represent information.
Cooperative learning techniques allow students to interact with each other in groups in ways that enhance their learning. When students work in cooperative groups, they make sense of new knowledge by interacting with others.
Three generalizations can be drawn from the research on cooperative learning:
1. Organizing groups by ability level should be done sparingly. Although homogeneous grouping in general is more effective than no grouping, research has shown that students of lower ability perform worse in homogeneous groups, while students of high ability perform only slightly better. Only students of medium ability show a significant increase in achievement when placed in groups with students of similar ability (Lou et al., 1996).
2. Cooperative groups should be small—three to four members per group is ideal.
3. Cooperative learning techniques are most effective when used consistently and systematically; they work best when used at least once a week. Teachers should ensure, however, that students still have time to practice skills independently.
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