With the aim of providing educators with scientific evidence on the educational effectiveness of the use of graphic organizers (OG), Inspiration Software company commissioned the Institute for the advancement of research in education (restricts, for its acronym in English) a meta study investigations in this field. Inspiration Software is the producer of Inspiration, one of the programs for Visual learning more known and used by teachers from all over the world, whose translation to the Spanish some time ago is available. The company reports that the English version is used by over 15 million students. The program promotes the creativity of students to help them visually represent information, so as to facilitate understanding it and learn it, through the elaboration of graphics organizers such as concept maps, webs and maps of Ideas. The licensing of this program has cost $895 for 20 computers.For its part, Restricts is a respected, independent research group with 36 years of experience, which provides research and services to companies in the area of education evaluation. Following the translation of the main elements of the Executive summary of the goal study by restricts 1: graphic organizers: review of scientifically based research. Summary of findings the research cited in this review of publications, shows that there are research findings that support the use of graphic organizers (OG) to improve both student learning as its performance in different grades, applicable both to students with different learning needs of a wide range of content areas.
Products offered by Inspiration Software Inc. company seem to be supported by findings of research with scientific Base (IBC); Scientifically Based Research). SBR, by its acronym in English. 29 Studies were reviewed for this document IBC. Of these, eight were transverse to two main areas of study, which is to say that examples of those studies were used in more than one area (namely IBC in the use of OG to develop, on the one hand skills of thinking and learning and by the other, literacies).
