Our Knowledge Organiser Purpose
For students to succeed in a particular area, they must have a foundation of factual knowledge, understand those facts in the context of a conceptual framework and organise knowledge in order to facilitate retrieval and application (Bransford et al., 2000). We see knowledge organisers as a way to enable this, in a much more systematic way than traditional revision guides and textbooks.
There are many arguments made for the necessity of the memorisation of important knowledge. Our working memory capacity is limited, so by storing more in our long-term memory, we can free up working memory capacity (Paas et al., 2004). With careful design and use of knowledge organisers, we can construct schemas, complex architectures of knowledge stored in long-term memory, with a view to automating their use (Paas et al., 2004). For a relatively complex task such as writing an English literature essay, for example, we can reduce the extraneous cognitive load by allowing students to access knowledge and quotations from their long-term memory.
It should be noted that knowledge organisers have a purpose outside the more obvious benefits for students. The construction and regular use of knowledge organisers can also develop teachers’ subject knowledge. The process of creating knowledge organisers in a specific subject then leads to a consideration of pedagogical content knowledge, the integration of subject expertise and an understanding of how that subject should be taught (Ball et al., 2008). A knowledge organiser can be a valuable starting point for effective curriculum design and a useful primer for those new to the topic.
Our Knowledge Organiser Content
When making decisions about what must be included, we consider that not everything can be included on an A4 piece of paper. So we balance the need to use concise space-saving definitions while still including meaning enough for it to be useful. The finite space also leads to choices about which knowledge we deem most important and which we exclude. Powerful knowledge, as defined by Young (Young, 2013), is specialised rather than general knowledge, and is differentiated from the experiences of students. Finally, we decide which knowledge is most useful for the understanding of the domain and which is important for the sample of the domain – the assessment.
Our Knowledge Organiser Pedagogy
Knowledge organisers are the curriculum’s ‘foot soldiers’, helping children to retain the knowledge of the curriculum. In the classroom, there are countless ways to use, but we have found them to be most effective when:
- Introducing topics, to encourage and generate discussion and retrieval of knowledge from previous learning.
- Used as a tool for retrieval, to interrupt the forgetting.
- Making links between learning to help children connect their learning.
- Used as a hand vocabulary reminder, encouraging children to use subject and topic-specific vocabulary in their work.