Advance Organizers as a Teaching Strategy: A Reply to Barnes and Clawson

Abstract

In a recent issue of this journal, Barnes and Clawson (1975) reviewed a selection of the growing number of experiments designed to facilitate learning by the use of organizers. Previous reviews (e.g., Ring & Novak, 1971; West & Fensham, 1974) have commented critically on Ausubel's learning theory, and it might be expected that Barnes and Clawson's review would provide further evidence, or new perspectives, on this topic. However, most of their paper consists of a selective review from which they conclude that The efficacy of advance organizers has not been established (p. 651). This conclusion would be important except for the fact that an overly large proportion of the data from these selected research studies must be considered somewhat trivial-a fact attested to by Barnes and Clawson in their concluding remarks (p. 657). Concerning their claim and related recommendations for further research, we have subjected the evidentiary conclusions to a rather circumspect analysis. We have asked three questions about the description of Ausubel's learning theory, the analysis of the selected studies, and the conclusions reached: (a) What exactly has Ausubel said about meaningful subsumption learning, and what are the substantive factors in subsumptive programmatic learning? (b) Does the analysis of the literature allow for any substantive conclusions? (c) Whether or not the selected literature supports the conclusions posited by Barnes and Clawson, does the conclusion itself further an understanding of the