Knowledge Organisers: Don't Forget the…

23 November, 2019 —

Knowledge Organisers: Don’t Forget the Organisation!

We explore ways to organise knowledge

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by Bradford Research School
on the 23rd November 2019

The Knowledge Organiser (KO) is now quite common in schools. Simply put, a knowledge organiser sets out the important, useful and powerful knowledge on a topic on a single page (Kirby, 2015). As schools focus so much on the knowledge element, it might be easy to neglect the second word. Yet how we organise the knowledge is crucial in ensuring that material is learnt and understood. Frederick Reif (2008) argues the following:

As much attention must be paid to the organization of knowledge as to its content. When trying to convey a body of knowledge, teachers should attempt to develop explicitly, and then gradually expand, a well-organized knowledge structure that students can actively use. In this way, a student's knowledge can be well organized at every stage-and and can be gradually reorganized as more knowledge is acquired. The student can then begin to appreciate the advantages of well-organized knowledge and can consistently practice using such knowledge. This way of proceeding is much better than letting students acquire new knowledge in piecemeal fashion-so that they are afterward left with the need to reorganize all this knowledge at the end.

Organise the material in different ways
A KO is only one representation of the material; it is not the material. It is not all of the domain either. For example, a table of dates and events is a representation of a historical event/period, but there are other ways to represent that material. There may be other important dates not on the list and other pieces of information that make sense of the list.

Pieces of information are not isolated, rather they are held in schemas, complex architectures of knowledge stored in long-term memory. We make sense of new things by placing them somehow within these representations. By moving the information out of the fixed presentation, often in list or hierarchy form, in a KO, we help to build these connections and ensure material sticks.

Elaboration is the process of connecting information to be remembered with that already known. For a good primer on the evidence, read this blog by Durrington Research School. When looking at material on a KO, we can ask simple how and why questions to make sense of the material’:
When did the First World War start? 3^rd September 1914: Why?
Which rocks are formed from molten rock? Igneous. How?
When was the amendment to the Poor Law? 1834: How does Dickens explore this in A Christmas Carol?

It is the interconnectedness of ideas that makes them stick and gives them higher utility. We can connect two things on a KO: What has x to do with y? How does a help me to explain b? We can do this randomly or teachers can prepare the most relevant pairings. We can also organise groups of information into categories e.g. chronologically, in order of importance, in order of relevance etc.

We can also use more complex graphic organisers to explore ideas. There are many different types of these, and most are familiar with mind maps, venn diagrams and fishbone diagrams. Oliver Caviglioli has a number of examples of these on his website. (We will come back to his work later). Pupils should be taught how to use specific graphic organisers and learn which work best for different types of material. While not just useful for using with KOs, they can help to take these ideas presented in a fixed form on the KO and allow students to explore and clarify other relationships.

Organise the Knowledge Organiser
The way information is organised on the page matters. While the format of the Knowledge Organiser will necessarily lead to large amounts of text, we should consider the way that text is presented and how pupils can move across sections of the text. Oliver Caviglioli (him again), in his excellent book Dual Coding With Teachers (2019) has a wealth of advice for the presentation of any document. He recommends the following principles in a section on posters, but we think they are useful for bearing in mind for Knowledge Organisers: Cut; Chunk; Align; Restrain.

Cut: Cut down the amount of content if necessary. Once the font size becomes tiny, and definitions become overly long, the information becomes harder to digest.
Chunk: Organise information together. Use signals to indicate hierarchy e.g. reducing font size.
Align: Think of the whole KO like a grid. Keep everything aligned.
Restrain: Resist the attempt to put more and more. You should aim to eliminate superfluous or distracting elements such as clipart or lots of colours.

Organise information to facilitate retrieval
There is a wealth of evidence showing that retrieval practice is effective in ensuring material is learnt, so our presentation of material in a Knowledge Organiser should make it easy for this to happen. This means that large blocks of texts which can’t be converted into quizzes should go. If it is this format, then it makes it easy for teachers to design tasks and quizzes, and it makes things much easier for pupils to facilitate their own revision and study. If the material isn’t easily quizzable then it will simply be reread (in which case what’s the point of creating a knowledge organise?) or ignored.

We will explore these ideas further and look at the implementation of Knowledge Organisers in schools on our new Maximising Memory and the Science of Learning course, starting in May.

Reif F (2008) Applying Cognitive Science to Education: Thinking and Learning in Scientific and Other Complex Domains. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Bradford Books.