A Preliminary Investigation of Advance Organizers for a Complex Educational Website

The study employed a 2 (university campus) X 3 (treatment groups) X 2 (time) factorial design with random assignment to examine the use of multimedia advance organizers before an activity that involved locating and synthesizing information at the complex educational website, A Teachers' Guide to the Holocaust (http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust). Most participants were undergraduate Education majors between the ages of 18 and 21 at two large, state universities. The results indicated no significant differences between advance organizer treatment groups and a control group with no advance organizers. Rationale, method, results, and suggestions for future studies are provided. ********** Due in part to students and teachers having faster connections to the Internet, there now exists an abundance of web-based instructional resources. One advantage to using these hypermedia resources is the amount of navigational freedom and learner control they provide. For example, whereas students reading a traditional textbook are expected to read through the information in a way that is designated by the author; the Web and other hypermedia environments allow students to choose which information they would like to access and when they would like to access it (Becker & Dwyer, 1994). The types of knowledge representation hypermedia provides may also be closer to schema-based memory structures than linear representations (Jonassen & Grabinger, 1990). On the other hand, the complexity of the hypermedia links and frequency with which they appear throughout web-based documents can be overwhelming and distracting. As Romiszowski (1990) cautioned: There is, however, some doubt as to whether all these process- oriented aspects of hypertext systems are necessarily "a good thing" in all manner of learning situations. The research on learner control of the learning process is, to say the least, mixed. There is much evidence to suggest that learners, when free to select their own strategies, do not always select wisely. (p. 322) When users become disoriented in hypermedia environments, they can lose mental power needed for learning (Jonassen, 1989; Kenny, 1993). Instructional designers are therefore presented with the problem of how to minimize the cognitive limitations of hypermedia, while not eliminating the apparent advantages of nonlinearity. Organizational or structural aids such as overview diagrams and advance organizers can help outline the structure of hypermedia information (Tripp & Roby, 1990). Large hypermedia documents can be made more accessible to learners by presenting preview material that either relates to familiar content or helps build mental scaffolding on which to add new information. This way, not only does a learner have more cognitive power available to learn new material, but the learning experience becomes more personalized and meaningful. "Content that is unfamiliar or organized in an unfamiliar fashion will be learned poorly unless the individual is provided with or develops concepts or organizing principles that aid the acquisition process" (Clark & Bean, 1982). "Traditionally, a device for orienting students to content has been the advance organizer" (Tripp & Roby, p. 121). McManus (2000) worked with a sample of 119 students in a Computing Tools for Educators course at a large southwestern university. Participants were divided into six groups (2 advance organizer X 3 levels of nonlinearity) to answer the question, "Is there a significant interaction between levels of non-linearity and the presence of an advance organizer in a web-based hypermedia learning environment" (p. 240)? His results, showed a near significant interaction between the levels of nonlinearity and the presence of an advance organizer (p=.052). Participants who worked in high nonlinear environments performed better when presented with an advance organizer than those in who worked in high nonlinear environments who were not presented with an advance organizer. …