Оқу-әдістемелік құрал: Графикалық ұйымдастырушылар

Pedagogical tool
A graphic organizer, also known as a knowledge map, concept map, story map, cognitive organizer, advance organizer, or concept diagram, is a pedagogical tool that uses visual symbols to express knowledge and concepts through relationships between them. The main purpose of a graphic organizer is to provide a visual aid to facilitate learning and instruction.

Graphic organizers have a history extending to the early 1960s. David Paul Ausubel was an American psychologist who coined the phrase "advance organizers" to refer to tools which bridge "the gap between what learners already know and what they have to learn at any given moment in their educational careers." Ausubel's advance organizers originally took the form of prose to merge the familiar—what students know—with the new or unfamiliar—what they have discovered or are learning. The advance organizer intended to help learners more easily retain verbal information but was written in a higher level of language. Later the advance organizers were represented as paradigms, schematic representations, and diagrams as they took on more geometric shapes. In 1969, Richard F. Barron came up with a tree diagram that was referred to as a "structured overview." The diagram introduced new vocabulary and used spatial characteristics and language written at the same level as the material being learned. In the classroom, this hierarchical organization was used by the teacher as a pre reading strategy to show relationships among vocabulary. Its use later expanded for not only pre reading strategies but for supplementary and post reading activities. It was not until the 1980s that the term graphic organizer was used.

Various theories have been put forth to undergird the assimilation of knowledge through the use of graphic organizers. According to Ausubel's Subsumption Theory, when a learner connects new information to their own preexisting ideas, they absorb new information. By relating new information to prior knowledge, learners reorganize their cognitive structures rather than build an entirely new one from scratch. Educational psychologist Richard E. Mayer reinterpreted Ausubel's subsumption theory within his own theory of assimilation encoding. In applying the use of organizers to the assimilation theory, advance organizers facilitate prior knowledge to working memory as well as its active integration of received information. However, he warned that advance organizers are not beneficial if the tools do not ask the learner to actively incorporate new information or if the preceding teaching methods and materials already are well defined and well structured. Explicit instruction on how to fill out the organizer along with color coding sections and sufficient class time to fill these out resulted in an 89 percent of students saying they felt graphic organizers were helpful in a post assignment survey.