Meaningful learning is a type of learning where the new knowledge to be acquired is added to previous knowledge, readjusting both. It is a way of learning opposite to traditional, more rote learning.
In meaningful learning, learners actively integrate new information into older information. The concept of mapping has been a useful technique for this: it allows learners to connect their existing knowledge with the topics they are learning.
David Ausubel (1918-2008), an important American psychologist and pedagogue, was the one who first spoke about this type of learning.
This cognitive psychologist focused on the learning of school students. He was especially interested in what the student already knew, which he believed was the main determinant of what he would learn later. Ausubel viewed learning as an active process and did not believe it was simply a passive response to the environment around us.
Students and apprentices actively seek to make sense of what surrounds them, 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. I saw it as the sum of all the knowledge we have acquired, as well as the relationships between the facts, concepts and principles that make up this knowledge.
For Ausubel, meaningful learning consists of bringing something new to our cognitive structure and uniting it with the existing knowledge located in this structure. In this way, we form meaning.
In the preface to his book Educational Psychology: A Cognitive Viewpoint, he writes:
“The most important factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Find out what he already knows and teach him accordingly.”
This led Ausubel to develop an interesting theory about meaningful learning and advancement organizers.
How to learn meaningfully?
Ausubel advocates the use of forward organizers as a mechanism to help link new learning material to existing related ideas.
Advance organizers consist of brief introductions to a topic, providing a structure to the student so that he or she relates the new information presented to his or her prior 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 features:
- Advance organizers are typically a small set of verbal or visual information.
- They are presented to the learner before beginning to learn a set of knowledge.
- They are of a high level of abstraction, in the sense that they do not contain new information to learn.
- Its objective is to provide the student with the means to generate logical relationships with the new material.
- They influence the student’s coding process.
Ausubel’s theory of advanced organizers states that there are two categories: comparative and expository.
Comparative organizers
These types of organizers activate existing schemas and are used as a reminder to bring into working memory what may not be consciously considered relevant.
A comparison organizer is used both to integrate information and to discriminate it.
In the words of Ausubel: “Comparative organizers integrate new ideas with basically similar concepts in the cognitive structure, and also increase the discriminability between new ideas and existing ideas, which are essentially different, but can be easily confused.”
Exhibition organizers
Expository organizers are often used when new learning material is unfamiliar to the learner. They often relate what the learner already knows to new, unfamiliar material, to make this unfamiliar material more plausible to the person.
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.
These are the four principles of assimilation theory:
- The most general concepts should be presented to students first and then the analysis should proceed.
- Teaching materials should include both new and previously acquired information. Comparisons between new and old concepts are crucial to learning.
- Already existing cognitive structures should not be developed, but simply reorganized in the student’s memory.
- 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 Viewpoint, in 1968. He was one of the first cognitive theorists during a time when behaviorism was the dominant theory that most influenced education.
Due to a variety of reasons, Ausubel never received the recognition he deserved.
Many of his ideas found their place in the mainstream of educational psychology, but Ausubel was not given the credit he deserved. For example, it was Ausubel who created the forward organizers common in textbooks today.
It was also he who emphasized, for the first time, that it was advisable to start 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 contrasted sharply with behaviorist theories, which emphasized the importance of starting with small pieces of content and building from them. Ausubel highlighted that what most influenced learning was what the student already knows, that is, the content of his cognitive structure.
Currently, 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.
Although Ausubel’s name is not widely recognized in the world of education, his ideas have an increasing impact. He helped psychology break with the rigid educational approaches that derived from behaviorist theories. It was also an impetus to start thinking about what was happening inside students’ brains when teachers taught them. Ausubel was one of the first theorists to view learning as an active process, not a passive experience. He wanted education professionals to get students engaged in their own learning and to help them relate new content to what they already know to make sense of their new knowledge.