Advance Organizer

An advance organizer is information a teacher presents ahead of new material to help a student organize what is about to be learned, directing attention to what matters in the coming material, highlighting the relationships among its ideas, and reminding the learner of relevant prior knowledge. David Ausubel introduced the concept as part of his theory of meaningful learning, developing it from around 1960 onward, out of his broader claim that what a learner already knows is the single most important factor governing what they can go on to learn. For an advance organizer to work, Ausubel held that the student must actually process and understand the organizer itself, and the organizer must show how the basic concepts and terms of the coming material relate to one another. He distinguished comparative organizers, which activate an existing mental structure the learner already has, from expository organizers, which supply new background knowledge the coming material will need.