Facilitating Learning - Ausubel's Theory

Ausubel’s Meaningful Verbal

Learning / Subsumption Theory

David Ausubel, M.D. (1918 - 2008 ) Meaningful Verbal Learning

Subsumption Theory

Biography David Ausubel was an American psychologist who did his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania (pre-med and psychology). He graduated from medical school at Middlesex University. Later he earned a Ph.D in Developmental Psychology at Columbia University. He was influenced by the work of Piaget. He served on the faculty at several universities and retired from academic life in 1973 and began his practice in psychiatry. Dr. Ausubel published several textbooks in developmental and educational psychology, and more than 150 journal articles. He was awarded the Thorndike Award for "Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education" by the American Psychological Association (1976).

Theory

Ausubel, whose theories are particularly relevant for educators, considered neo-behaviorist views inadequate. Although he recognized other forms of learning, his work focused on verbal learning. He dealt with the nature of meaning, and believes the external world acquires meaning only as it is converted into the content of consciousness by the learner.

Meaningful Verbal Learning

Meaning is created through some form of representational equivalence between language (symbols) and mental context.

Two processes are involved:

1. Reception, which is employed in meaningful verbal learning,

2. Discovery, which is involved in concept formation and problem solving.

Ausubel's work has frequently been compared with Bruner's. The two held similar views about the hierarchical nature of knowledge, but Bruner was strongly oriented toward discovery processes, where Ausubel gave more emphasis to the verbal learning methods of speech, reading and writing.

“Advance organizer”is a major instructional tool proposed by Ausubel.

act as a subsuming bridge between new learning material and existing related ideas.

Two benefits:

1. You will find it easier to connect new information with what you already know about the topic

2. You can readily see how the concepts in a certain topic are related to each other

Types of advance organizers

a. expository

b. narrative

c. skimming

d. graphic organizer

e. KWL chart

FOCUS OF AUSEBEL’S THEORY

1

1. Derivative Subsumption –

describes the situation in which the new information you learn is an example of a concept that

you have already learned.

Ex. You have acquired a basic concept such as “bird”. We know that a bird has feathers, a beak, lay egg.

2. Correlative Subsumption

3. Combinatorial Learning

Imagine that a child was well acquainted with banana,Mango, dalandan, guava etc. but the child did not knowUntil she was taught, that these were all examples of fruits.

In that case the child already knew a lot of examples of the concept,But did not know the concept itself until it was taught to her.

4. Combinatorial Learning