Advance organisers in teacher professional development

About this research

An advance organiser is a tool which is introduced before to-be-learned material. It is intended to help a learner understand new information by connecting it to what they already know. Because advance organisers are thought to improve learning of new information, they may be a useful tool for teacher educators in helping professionals learn new bodies of material as part of their training.

For example, teachers may be learning about reading instruction. It is an area that involves specialist technical terms, understanding of numerous interacting subskills, and a sizable body of empirical evidence. Making sense of, and remembering, this large body of knowledge is challenging.

Advance organisers represent a potentially promising way of making this task more manageable for teachers, which would in turn be beneficial for their pupils.

Ambition Institute set out to compare how different types of introductory materials can support teachers in learning and understanding new information in real-life online professional development settings.

Findings

Based on the results of our study, adding an advance organiser to online professional development for teachers is unlikely to improve learning, even where teachers had little prior knowledge of the topic. This finding of no effect can potentially help teacher educators better prioritise the investments they make in designing new materials.

Read the research

Read a summary of our findings for educators: Summary for educators

Read the findings in full: Full research report

Cite this paper

Meliss, S., Such, C., Cottinghatt, S., Patel, S., & Sims, S. (2024). Do advance organisers help teachers learn new information during online professional development? Ambition Institute. Available at: https://www.ambition.org.uk/research-advance-organisers