6 ways to make organizers work.

Teachers and students show how to put graphic organizers to use in science.

1. Plan Your Teaching.

Graphic organizers are terrific curriculum-planning tools. Here is how Judith Reed, a second-grade teacher at West Ridge Elementary in Greece, New York, used a curriculum map to help her plan an integrated unit.

Judith knew her students were crazy about whales, so she integrated her instruction across subject areas using whales as the focus. Creating a conceptual organizer allowed her to add ideas, literature, and other resources as they occurred to her, enabled her to see the whole picture at a glance, and helped her make connections she might not have seen otherwise.

2. Tap into students' interests.

Graphic organizers can help you create an enticing science curriculum based on students' curiosity about the world. Here's how sixth-grade teacher Linda Haren of Knoxville, Tennessee, did it with a KWHL (What I Already Know, What I Want to Learn, How to Learn, and What I Learned) chart.

After a field trip to a local river near a chemical plant, Linda asked her students to list what they knew about the plant and its environment in the first column of the [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] chart shown above, and what they wanted to learn in the second column. Next, the sixth graders worked cooperatively to fill out the third column of the chart, identifying how they would gather information to answer their questions. In doing so, they became the engineers of their own investigation - which was exactly what Linda was aiming for. Students interviewed politicians, plant workers, and residents; visited a water analysis lab; and created a cyclical organizer illustrating the impact of pollution on the water cycle. Students completed the last column of the chart, What I Learned, as part of their end-of-unit assessment.

3. Uncover misconceptions.

In addition to helping you find out what students know about a science topic, graphic organizers also help you identify what they don t know. What's the benefit of sleuthing out students' misconceptions? It makes for more effective science instruction: Research shows that unless you begin with students' misconceptions and address them explicitly in your instruction - asking kids to talk about their beliefs and to test them out through activities and experiments - it's very difficult to uproot their naive ideas.

Let's take a look at how Deborah Pease, a sixth-grade teacher at Chenango Bridge Elementary in Binghamton, New York, handled students' misunderstandings with a graphic organizer.

Before beginning a unit on electricial devices, Deborah asked her students to draw what they knew about how radios work. Deborah found - as the sketch below indicates - that many of her students believed that radio waves travel through power lines or wires.

Looking at her students' sequential drawings and explanations convinced Deborah to deal with the misconception as part of her instruction. She began by asking students if radios were connected to wires. She went on to discuss the concept that radio waves travel through air, and then students investigated this further.

4. Record science data.

Graphic organizers can help students keep track of science investigations, whether short lab experiments or long-term explorations. As with any organizer, you can have students create them individually, in small groups, or as a class.

For an experiment on static electricity, Deborah created a graphic organizer called a matrix, which compares a number of categories by key variables. Her students recorded information in the matrix during the experiment. Afterward, with the data organized in a structured, visual way, students found it easier to formulate hypotheses.

5. Assess learning.

Graphic organizers can be an effective tool for evaluating individual students' learning, especially of those who have difficulty with writing. But organizers should not stand alone as an assessment for any student. Students should always have the opportunity to supplement the organizer with oral or written explanations. Here's a look at how one teacher carried this off.

Carolyn Curren, a fourth-grade teacher at Queensbury Elementary in Queensbury, New York, asked one of her students. Karen, to create a conceptual graphic after studying manatees. Carolyn and Karen then met to discuss the organizer. During their conversation. Karen explained the major concepts outlined in the larger circles and the connections among them. She also revised her organizer as she explained it. For example, she changed texture to skin after noting that color, tough, and wrinkled described skin better. Later she added. "If there was room, I would add relatives and put dugary as an example. And I would add mammal."

When asked what else she knew that wasn't on the web, Karen said, "A lot. How much they weigh - 1,200 to 1,500 pounds. And they are the size of a car - about 10 to 14 feet." She then added this last fact to the web. By supplementing the web with a conference, Carolyn was able to accurately assess what Karen had learned.

6. Evaluate your instruction.

You can use a graphic organizer to reflect upon your teaching. Pat Lynch, a third-grade teacher in New Orleans, used a graphic organizer to guide her teaching on rain forests. She focused on the layers of the rain forest, and the plant and animal life in each layer.

After teaching the unit as planned, she discovered that while students understood the major concept of rain-forest layers, they were most interested in the animals and the rain forest's preservation. Pat went back to her organizer and revised it to reflect her students' interests; her version is shown at right.

Graphic organizers can also be used to help design assessment procedures. When you identify the major concepts and connections in planning a lesson, you also use those concepts as the basis of assessment. For example, Pat Lynch shared her original rain forest organizer with the students at the start of the unit. Students were made aware that she expected them to understand the function of the forest's four layers, and, indeed, this was what they were tested on. Evaluation that matches instruction is the best measure of student learning. Graphic organizers can help you ensure this. These six tips are just the beginning. You will discover many other uses for graphic organizers in your science classroom and all across the curriculum.