Optimal presentation of graphic organizers and text: A case for large bites?

Abstract

In three experiments, we investigated the optimal presentation of graphic organizers (GOs)

Learning by doing versus learning by viewing: Three experimental comparisons of learner-generated versus author-provided graphic organizers.

“…By contrast, learner-generated graphic organizers are suggested to be of benefit because they promote generative learning (V. C. Hall, Bailey, & Tillman, 1997;Katayama & Robinson, 2000), more accurately reflect the learner's understanding (McCagg & Dansereau, 1991), promote deeper processing during construction (Alvermann, 1981), allow instructors to assess and correct a learner's misconception, and promote better connections with existing memory (Kiewra, DuBois, Christian, & McShane, 1988;Kiewra et al, 1991). Conversely, it has been suggested that constructing graphic organizers requires extensive training (McCagg & Dansereau, 1991), is cognitively demanding (R. H. Hall & Sidio-Hall, 1994), and demands significant intervention on the part of the instructor to correct misconceptions or to direct learners floundering with an unfamiliar technique or with new information (Robinson, Corliss, Bush, Bera, & Tomberlin, 2003).…”

Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Note Taking on Computer-Based Graphic Organizers

“…GOs use words to represent concepts from a text in two dimensions rather than one. The effectiveness of GOs is usually attributed to the fact that text concept relations and hierarchies are explicitly communicated by the relative spatial location of words within the organizer (Robinson et al, 2003). This bi-dimensional arrangement of text concepts enables learners to more easily compare relationships across concept attributes than in linear adjuncts.…”

“…A linear text adjunct imposes more extraneous cognitive load than a GO because learners must use limited working memory resources to search for concept relations (a task unrelated to schema development) that are made more explicit in a GO. Like note taking, the benefits of GOs have been observed with both print-based (Kiewra, Kauffman, Robinson, Dubois, & Staley, 1999;Robinson & Kiewra, 1995;Robinson & Schraw, 1994) and computer-based instruction (Robinson et al, 2003).…”

“…One promising method for helping online students to actively process a text is note taking on a graphic organizer (GO) template. A GO is a graphical or spatial representation of text information that uses the relative spatial location of text segments to communicate hierarchical and coordinate relationships among text concepts (Robinson, Corliss, Bush, Bera, & Tomberlin, 2003). GO templates have been successfully used to help learners develop a deeper understanding of a text (Igo, Bruning, & McCrudden, 2005;Igo, Bruning, McCrudden, & Kauffman, 2003;Kauffman, 2004).…”

Planning with graphical overviews : effects on support tools on self-regulated learning

“…Moreover, research shows that several aspects of the learning environment influence learning. For example, Robinson et al (2003) found that the size of the learning domain influenced learning. Therefore, we must be cautious to generalize these findings to different visualizations of the instructional information and learning domains.…”