A unit on animals was taught to 64 preschool children (44 in an experimental group and 20 in a control group). Children in the experimental group were taught nine major concepts over four levels of abstraction (designated as superordinate, intermediate, subordinate, or particular levels). Each concept was presented by means of an advance organizer…

A study investigated the effectiveness of using a small-group discussion as the main vehicle for the construction of an initial representation of a problem that activates previously acquired knowledge. College students (N=39) were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition or a control condition and asked to brainstorm about a presented…

This study concerns determining whether three types of advance organizers (visual, audio, or written) had any effect upon learning a biological concept as measured by a constructed achievement test and whether advance organizers are more effective across learner variables of I.Q., abstract reasoning and sex. One hundred twenty randomly selected…

Instead of urging content area teachers to teach reading skills, reading personnel should be providing them with prereading techniques designed to organize or provide experiences relevant to new concepts to be learned by students. Among the conclusions reached from a review of relevant research are that using multi-leveled textbooks in a classroom…

One of the most important tasks that teachers undertake is to teach concepts. Without a good understanding of concepts, students have difficulty even understanding the basics. Several approaches to teaching thinking have been analyzed and research concludes that it is more effective to teach thinking in the context of a subject rather than as a…

Two studies were conducted to compare the advance organizer and concept elaboration models of instruction with a task analysis approach. It was hypothesized that the concept elaboration group would achieve significantly higher than either the advance organizer group or the task analysis group on concept learning and principle learning. A pilot…