Advance Organizers: Concrete Versus Abstract

Abstract

We used two experiments to examine the relative effects of concrete and abstract advance organizers on students’ memory for subsequent prose. In Experiment 1, students who effectively encoded a concrete organizer recalled significantly more of the content of a brief subsequent text than did students who effectively encoded an abstract organizer or who read the passage without an organizer. Experiment 2 replicated Experiment 1 with a 5,000-word passage. The results of the second experiment confirmed those of the first. The results of the experiments are discussed in terms of the memorability, familiarity, and visualizability of concrete and abstract verbal materials.