Chapter 4

CUES, QUESTIONS, AND ADVANCE ORGANIZERS

Here is a general idea of what these three instructional strategies are:

• CUES: Explicit reminders or hints about what students are about to experience
• QUESTIONS: Trigger students' memories and help them to access prior knowledge
• ADVANCE ORGANIZERS: Structures provided to help students make sense of new content.

There are several different programs that can be used in order to incorporate these things into your lessons:

Word Processing Applications:

• Great for using expository, narrative or graph organizers. You could have the children make brochures and programs, write stories, articles and artistic works, or create tables and charts. These things will help them to stretch their minds and get a better understanding of the material that you will be covering.
  
  ...[For very lower elementary students, most of this might be a little bit to advanced, and you may
  wish to simplify the assignments for them. Kidspiration might be helpful.]
  ...[These would be good things to use, because they can easily be electronically shared among
  the students so that they can review the information that their peers gathered as well as their own.]

Spreadsheet Software:

• This is good for making rubrics to prepare students to apply their abilities and knowledge. Use the table-making features in order to insert your choice criterion into the rubric so that the students know what you are looking for before they start their assignment.

Organizing and Brainstorming Software:

• When you use cues, they should be very straightforward.
  ...[This is especially important with very young elementary students. If you leave it up to them to pick up on hints, you're not going to get the results you're expecting from them.]
  
  
• There are helpful tools within this software that lets you insert clip art, photographs, and other visual aids to enhance the students' understanding. This software is also extremely helpful for any student, because auditory learners can listen to information, and visual learners can study pictures and videos.

• Programs such as Inspiration and Kidspiration can be used to help the students organize their own information they've found, or else you can start one for them and leave areas blank, so it works as a type of study guide/guided note-taking activity.

Multimedia:

• This helps children to retrieve knowledge they've previously gained on the topic and also develop a mental model to help them understand new information. Studies have shown that when a PowerPoint is utilized in presenting information to students, the students remember more of the information.
  ...[This is something that can used with students at any level, younger or older]

• Another helpful thing to use in lessons is videos. Here are a couple of sites to search them:
  ...United Streaming
  ...Google Video
  One of many good things about using sites like this is that it wouldn't be hard for the students to go home and view the same thing as in class on their own computers.
  

In using these techniques in the classroom, it is important to use Bloom's Taxonomy in mind in order to keep your practices developmentally appropriate and also make sure that you are challenging the children. Here is a good website from the University of Texas that will help you to come up with cues and questions that go with each level of Bloom's Taxonomy.