Graphic organizers are effective study guides that can provide students with a general overview of information, show patterns, highlight main ideas, and organize supporting facts. They can also help students understand and memorize ideas. Graphic organizers are helpful study guides for all students, but they are especially beneficial for students with expressive language and receptive language disorders and those who are visual learners.
With this type of representation, graphic organizers help students with language processing deficits by visually presenting the most important information and eliminating information that is not as critical. This helps students focus and to place information into a mental framework without excess language processing demands getting in the way.
Used as study guides, graphic organizers can help students link information to prior learning and provide a foundation to link future learning. The process of placing information onto the graphic organizer helps students think about concepts and organize those thoughts as they write. When used as a small group learning activity, graphic organizers can help students learn different ways of looking at the information by discussing ideas with others.
There are many types of graphic organizers, and one of the simplest forms is the Venn Diagram. Venn Diagrams are created by:
- Drawing an oval in the center of a paper and writing a few words in its center to represent the main idea being taught.
- Related ideas are placed in ovals that interconnect to the main idea.
- Ideas that relate to more than one additional oval are drawn so they extend into all related ideas.
