ABSTRACT
Graphic organizers enable students to organize new knowledge. They present a structure around which students may hang thoughts, ideas, facts, terms, or other critical course content. Graphic organizers allow students to illustrate concepts for themselves by providing a way to visually demonstrate and communicate relationships between ideas and content, often drawing from an existing pattern or template. With increased information available to students, it is becoming increasingly important to find mechanisms that allow for visual processing of information. Entirely new fields, such as visual analytics (Keim, Kohlhammer, Ellis, & Mansmann, 2010), are being developed to help think about how to process large amounts of information. These useful tools help learners to conceptualize how information interacts through defining features; cause and effect; comparison and contrast; sequences; cycles; and hierarchies, categories, and other mechanisms.
