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Graphic Organizers
Definition A graphic organizer is a visual, graphic display that illustrates ideas within a learning task. Graphic organizers help students to think about, visualize, and arrange their knowledge. Graphic organizers are also sometimes referred to as knowledge or concept maps, cognitive organizers, advance organizers, or concept diagrams.
Benefits of Graphic Organizers
- Support inquiry-based learning and critical thinking.
- Provide a tool as students draw upon analysis skills to clarify relationships, organize thoughts, and formulate plans or process steps.
- Facilitate convergent thinking and assist students as they combine information into a meaningful whole.
- Provide a foundation for questioning, discovery and creativity.
- Show the order and completeness of a student's thought process - strengths and weaknesses of understanding become clearly evident.
- Assist students in identifying the relative importance of facts and ideas.
- Help both the student and the teacher perceive conflicts or discrepancies in information.
- Facilitate creations that help students retain information and extend students’ ability to exchange their understandings in collaborative group work.
- Support students who are highly visual.
- Motivate and engage students.
Common Uses of Graphic Organizers
- To illustrate a student or class's prior and anticipated understandings about a topic.
- To construct descriptions and details.
- To compare and contrast.
- To classify.
- To illustrate sequences.
- To depict cause and effect.
- To enable decision making.
- To brainstorm and connect in the construction of new ideas.
Common Types of Graphic Organizers
These are a few types of organizers. Many others exist and are very effective.
- Webs: have many uses including brainstorming, comparing and classifying.
- Charts or Matrixes: a powerful tool for comparison and contrast, cause and effect and decision making. Venn diagrams are part of this group.
- Maps or Tree maps: excellent for description and analysis.
- Chains: used effectively for sequencing activities.
- Sketches: used to show spatial relationships and to visually depict concrete objects.
- Flow Charts: efficiently enable classifying and sequencing.
Selecting Graphic Organizers
- Consider the grade and expertise level of the students
- Carefully assess the assignment and pick the most effective organizer for the task.
- Choose organizers that reflect inquiry learning theory and enable construction not reproduction of knowledge.
- Choose the design format that best helps demonstrate the relationship between appropriate ideas.
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