ABSTRACT
Educators design their lessons in ways that help students organize, comprehend, and retain new, unfamiliar, and complex material. One way to facilitate student performance is to provide an advanced preview of the material to be learned and organize the lecture content in ways that are consistent with the preview. The approach is consistent with Ausubel’s (1960) belief that conceptual previews that are high in generalizability and inclusiveness should increase student learning. The use of conceptual previews has been termed advanced organizers (AOs), devices that Ausubel (1968) described as “appropriately relevant and inclusive introductory materials” (p. 148). These previews would be presented in advance of learning and at higher levels of abstraction, generality, and inclusiveness than the material learned.
