Organization

In cognitive science Opens in new window, the term organization simply involves classifying items into meaningful groups.

Definition and Overview

For example, you might cluster apple, grapes, and hamburger into a category of foods and form other categories for animals, vehicles, baseball equipment. You would then rehearse each category and recall it as a cluster.

Because well-organized content illustrates connections among its elements, cognitive load is decreased, and encoding (and subsequent retrieval) is more effective (Mayer, 2008).

Research in reading, memory, and classroom instruction confirms the value of organization in promoting learning.

Research indicates that experts learn more efficiently than novices because their knowledge in long-term memory is better organized, allowing them to access it and connect it to new information. (Bransford et al., 2000).

Information can be organized in several ways:

1. Charts and matrices — useful for organizing large amounts of information into categories.
2. Hierarchies — effective when new information can be subsumed under existing ideas.
3. Models — helpful for representing relationships that cannot be observed directly. The model of human memory is an example.
4. Outlines — useful for representing the organizational structure in a body of written materials.

Other types of organization include graphs, tables, flowcharts, and maps (Merkely & Jefferies, 2001).

Learners can also use these organizers as personal study aids in their attempts to make the information they are studying meaningful.

Note that people construct knowledge that makes sense to them, so if the organizational structure offered by a writer or teacher does not make sense to readers or learners, they will (mentally) reorganize it in a way that does, whether or not it is correct. When the way content is organized is unclear, people often memorize snippets of it, resulting in rote learning, or they ignore it altogether.

Discussion is essential to making the organization of new material meaningful to learners. This is the reason people join book clubs, for example. As they discuss the book, its organization and the author’s intent become clearer to the participants.