The ORDER Routine responds to three priorities teachers have identified for their students: the ability to form relationships within information sets, the ability to organize information, and the ability to create visual devices for learning. Through use of the ORDER Routine, students learn to identify how information in a reading passage or lecture is structured. The routine helps students decide what information is important; determine whether it is best organized in a sequential, descriptive, compare-and-contrast, or problem-solution format; depict key pieces of information and their relationships in a graphic organizer; explain the organizer to others; and use the organizer to prepare for tests or reports.

In one study of the effectiveness of the ORDER ROUTINE, tests measured students' ability to recognize the expository relationships among content in a reading passage and to create appropriate graphic organizers for the content. Students who learned to use the routine earned significantly higher scores than those who did not.

The Order Routine Research

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