MEANINGFUL LEARNING: AUSUBEL'S THEORY (WITH EXAMPLE) - ECONOMÍA - 2025

The significant learning is a method of learning where new knowledge acquired relates to prior knowledge. It is a way of learning opposite to traditional learning, which is more rote.

In meaningful learning, learners actively integrate new information into older information. The concept of mapping has been a useful technique for this; allows learners to connect their existing knowledge with the topics they are learning.

David Ausubel, who first spoke about this type of learning, was an American cognitive psychologist who focused on the learning of high school students; he was especially interested in what the student already knows, since according to him it was the main determinant of what he would learn later.

Ausubel saw learning as an active process and did not believe that it was simply a passive response to the environment around us. Students and learners actively seek to make sense of their surroundings by integrating new knowledge with what they have already learned.

The cognitive structure in meaningful learning

The key concept of Ausubel's learning theory is cognitive structure. He saw the cognitive structure as the sum of all the knowledge that we have acquired, as well as the relationships between the facts, concepts and principles that make up this knowledge.

David ausubel

For Ausubel, meaningful learning consists of bringing something new to our cognitive structure and joining it to the existing knowledge located in this structure. In this way, we form the meaning.

In the preface to his book Educational Psychology: A Cognitive Point of View, Ausubel writes:

“The most important factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Find out what he already knows and teach him accordingly ”(Ausubel, 1968, p. Vi)

This led Ausubel to develop an interesting theory about meaningful learning and advancement organizers.

Characteristics of meaningful learning

Ausubel's theory focuses on meaningful learning. According to his theory, to learn meaningfully, individuals must relate new knowledge to relevant concepts they already know. The new knowledge must interact with the knowledge structure of the learner.

Meaningful learning can be contrasted with mechanical learning. The latter can also incorporate new information into the existing knowledge structure but without interaction.

Mechanical memory is used to remember sequences of objects, such as telephone numbers. However, they are of no use to the person who memorizes them when it comes to understanding the relationships between objects, since the concepts that are learned through mechanical memory cannot be related to previous knowledge.

In essence, there is nothing in the person's existing cognitive structure that they can relate the new information to to form meaning. In this way, it can only be learned mechanically.

Advantages of learning meaningfully

Meaningful learning builds on prior knowledge and becomes the basis for learning additional information. Machine learning doesn't stick because it doesn't have these meaningful connections. Because of that, it fades from memory pretty quickly.

Since meaningful learning involves a recognition of the links between concepts, it has the privilege of being transferred to long-term memory. The most crucial element in Ausubel's meaningful learning is how new information is integrated into the knowledge structure.

Consequently, Ausubel believed that knowledge is organized in a hierarchical way: new information is significant in a way that can be related to what we already know.

When is there meaningful learning?

If a person has relevant content in their existing cognitive structure that the new materials can be related to, then the learning can be meaningful.

If new materials cannot be related to any prior knowledge, learning can only occur mechanically.

How to learn meaningfully?

Ausubel advocates the use of progress organizers as a mechanism to help link new learning material with related ideas that already exist.

The advance or advanced organizers consist of brief introductions to a topic, providing a structure to the student so that he or she relates the new information that is presented with their previous knowledge.

Advanced organizers have a very high level of abstraction and constitute the beginning of a deductive exposition; they are the beginning of an exhibition that goes from the most general to the most particular. These tools have the following essential characteristics:

• Advancement organizers are typically a small set of verbal or visual information.
• They are presented to the learner before beginning to learn a body of knowledge.
• They are of a high level of abstraction, in the sense that they do not contain new information to be learned.
• Its objective is to provide the student with the means to generate logical relationships with new material.
• They influence the student's coding process.

Ausubel's advance organizers theory states that there are two categories: comparative and expository.

Comparative organizers

This type of organizer activates existing schemas and is used as a reminder to bring to your working memory what you may not consciously consider relevant. A comparison organizer is used both to integrate information and to discriminate it.

"Comparative organizers integrate new ideas with basically similar concepts in the cognitive structure, and also increase the discriminability between new and existing ideas, which are essentially different but can be easily confused" (Ausubel, 1968)

Exhibition organizers

Expository organizers are frequently used when new learning material is unfamiliar to the learner.

They often relate what the learner already knows to new and unfamiliar material, to make this little-known material more plausible to the person.

Examples of meaningful learning

In educational contexts, the best way to present advance organizers is in written and concrete form, contrary to what Ausubel proposed, who stated that advance organizers should be abstract in nature.

Additionally, several guidelines have been suggested regarding the use of organizers:

• Advancement organizers should be used only when subjects are unable to make appropriate connections on their own.
• They should be used explicitly.
• Organizers should provide students with adequate time to study the materials.
• It is advisable for students to be tested to see what they remember after a short time.

Hung and Chao (2007) summarize three principles related to design that Ausubel proposed for the construction of advance organizers.

First, the person who designs them must determine the content of the advance organizer based on the principle of assimilation.

Second, the designer has to consider the suitability of the content taking into account the characteristics of the learner or student.

Third and last, the designer must choose between the exhibition and comparative preview organizers.

Assimilation theory

Unlike many other educational theories, Ausubel's assimilation theory was developed exclusively for educational designs. Develop a way to create teaching materials that help students organize content to make it meaningful and learn better.

The four principles of the assimilation theory:

1. The more general concepts should be presented to the students first and then they should proceed to the analysis.
2. Teaching materials should include both new and previously acquired information. Comparisons between old and new concepts are crucial for learning.
3. Already existing cognitive structures should not be developed, but simply reorganized in the student's memory.
4. The instructor's task is to fill the gap between what the student already knows and what he must learn.

Contributions to education

Ausubel published his most important book on learning theory, Educational Psychology: A Cognitive Point of View, in 1968, with a second edition in 1978. He was one of the first cognitive theorists during a time when behaviorism was the theory. dominant influence on education.

Due to a wide variety of reasons, Ausubel never received the recognition it deserved. Many of his ideas found their place in the mainstream of educational psychology, but Ausubel was not given his due credit. For example, it was Ausubel who created the advance organizers that are common in textbooks today.

It was also he who emphasized, for the first time, that it was convenient to begin with a general idea of ​​the subject to be learned or studied or with a fundamental structure of it and, later, learn the details.

This approach is practiced in many contexts today, but, at the time, it was in sharp contrast to behaviorist theories, which emphasized the importance of starting with and building on small pieces of content.

Ausubel emphasized that what most influenced learning was what the student already knows, that is, the content of their cognitive structure. Today, most educational styles try to combine instruction with the student's prior knowledge so that they learn in a meaningful way, just what Ausubel claimed.

Despite the fact that Ausubel's name is not widely recognized in the world of education, his ideas are having an increasing impact. It helped psychology break with the rigid educational approaches that derived from behaviorist theories.

It was also an impetus to start thinking about what was going on inside students' brains when teachers teach them.

Ausubel was one of the first theorists to see learning as an active process, not a passive experience. He wanted education professionals to engage students in their own learning and to help them connect new content with what they already know to make sense of their new knowledge.