Effectiveness of Use of Advance Organisers in the Initial Instruction for Mastery on Self-Esteem of Field Dependent and Field Independent Students

Abstract

The study was undertaken with a purpose of studying effectiveness of use of advance organisers in the initial teaching for mastery. Two sets, each having 12 mastery learning packages were prepared. In one set of packages, generalisation was used as advance organiser, whereas analogy as advance organiser was used in the second set of ML units. The sample comprised of 509 IX-grade students from 12 schools selected randomly out of over 100 schools of Chandigarh. The main findings of the study were: (i) Three instructional groups [Mastery learning-generalisation-ML-GEN, Mastery Learning- Analogy-ML-ANAL and conventional group learning (CGL)] were found significantly different in respect of self-esteem gain means yielded by them. The treatment groups (ML-GEN, ML-ANAL) outperformed the CGL students in terms of their gain mean scores suggesting that both (ML-GEN, ML-ANAL) groups achieved higher as compared to the control group (CGL). Out of ML-GEN and ML-ANAL, the group with generalisations advance organiser (MLGEN) achieved higher. ii) The gain mean scores on self-esteem were not found to be significantly different for both field dependent and field independent groups of children. (iii) There was no significant interaction effect between instructional strategy (ML-GEN, MLANAL and CGL) and cognitive style (FD and FI) to yield different gain means of selfesteem.(iv) Mastery learning strategies (ML-GEN, ML-ANAL) had larger effect sizes and were found to be the best differentiating factors between experimental and control groups.