Research on the Application of Advanced Organizer on Chemistry Education

Advance organizer and its application had attracted much attention since the concept was proposed by American psychologist David Ausubel. The theory had developed a lot though long-term researches. Now the testees included adults and children and the theory was used to guided textbook design as well as teaching and learning. However, existing researches mainly emphasized whether advanced organizers can efficiently promote students’ studies. Little work had been done about how to make use of advance organizers based on the need of students. In this paper, application of different kinds of advance organizers on chemistry textbooks design and problem solving in chemical Education were explored .Chemistry textbooks were the most important material for teaching and learning. Through analyzing the uses of advance organizers in chemistry textbooks of U.K., U.S., Hong Kong and mainland, we found that advanced organizers were often used to help introducing concepts . According to the abstraction and the needs of students, different kinds of advanced organizers were used to introduce concepts, including epigynous, hypogynous and comparative advanced organizers. Different books chose different advanced organizers, such as descriptive and graphic advanced organizers, according to the characteristics of knowledge and studying resources.It had already been confirmed that by using advanced organizers properly, students’ achievement could be enhanced. However, it is assumed that advanced organizers of different kinds or used by different methods had different effects on the students. In this paper, influences of different advanced organizers and advanced organizers with different presentation on problem solving were studied. The results showed that different types of advanced organizers had different effects on promoting chemistry problem-solving. For example, “picture&depiction” was better than “depiction”, “epigyny&hypogyny” better than “epigyny” and “converse” better than “direct”. Furthermore, the effects of advanced organizers with different presentation also differed. For example, descriptive advanced organizers with direct presentation were better than the indirect one, and graphic advanced organizers which were presented at a time were better than those presented step by step.