(article by David P. Ausubel)
I was very reluctant to read the article once I saw the copyright of 1960. I thought to myself, "WHY are we reading an article that is 50 years old?!" in a technology class. After reading the article, it appears that the issue (struggle with student knowledge retention) was the same as it is today. With the help of graphic organizers, it helps students organize the information in a manner that will assist them in remembering/retaining the information in a more meaningful and long lasting way.
My favorite part of this article is the following: "The metallurgical topic was chosen on the basis of being generally unfamiliar to undergraduates in liberal arts and sciences (i.e., not ordinarily included in the chemistry courses), but still sufficiently elementary to be both comprehensible and interesting to novices with no prior background in the field. Really?!?!?!!? Reading/learning about the "metallurgical properties of plain carbon steel"...I thought this guy said the topic was going to be "interesting to novices".
In all seriousness, I did enjoy & relate to the last paragraph of the article. It reads as this...."The suggestion was offered that the greater use of appropriate (substantive rather than historical) advance organizers in the teaching of meaningful verbal material could lead to more effective retention." That's what we all want, right? More effective retention! Furthermore, "this procedure would also render unnecessary much of the rote memorization to which students resort because they are required to learn the details of a discipline before having a sufficient number of key subsuming concepts. I think the use of advanced/graphic organizers more definitely help students to organize information and make those connections to prior knowledge which leads to learning rather than memorizing.
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