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Cues "hints" and questioning are very important tools to help students to activate prior knowledge which help them to retrieve information that they already know about the topic. Researchers hypothesized that background knowledge can influence what is perceived and it is very interesting to read about the experiment they did with students that went to an office of a professor and later needed to remember what was in the office. When students tried to recover what they saw there, they remembered what was expected them to see, regardless of whether it was there or not (and I agree with Kay Ruf, when she makes the analogy with the testimony by witnesses - how trustful it can be!). To help to retrieve background knowledge, instructors can ask questions to students about the topic before introducing the topic to establish a "mental set" and to create new expectation on the students. Research indicates that the more students know about the topic, more they tend to be interested in it. So, questions that helps students to obtain a deeper understand of content will eventually increase their interest in the topic. Research also indicates that higher level of questioning produce more learning than the ones that simply requires students to recall or recognize information. The best questions are those that require students to analyze and even critique the information presented to them. Also waiting after a question is made helps students to formulate and increase the depth of student's response.
Advance organizers are not the same as summaries or overviews they are bridges between what student knows and what student needs to know. Expository advance organizers simply describe the new content to which students are to be exposed. Narrative advance organizers present information to students in story format. Also Skimming is a form of advance organizer that help students to skimming information before it is read and Graphic Advance organizers are nonlinguistic representation with ovals and linking arrows that convey interrelationships. |
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