1. David Ausubel
Meaningful Learning Theory

2. Biography
 Born: October 25, 1918
 Died: July 9, 2008
 Grew up in Brooklyn, New York
 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.

3. • In 1973, Ausubel retired from academic life and
devoted himself to his psychiatric practice.
• In 1976, he received the Thorndike Award from
the American Psychological Association for
"Distinguished Psychological Contributions to
Education".

4. Meaningful Learning Theory
 Concerned with how
students learn large
amounts of meaningful
material from
verbal/textual
presentations in a
learning activities.
 Meaningful learning
results when new
information is acquired
by linking the new
information in the
learner’s own cognitive
structure
 Learning is based on the
representational,
superordinate and
combinatorial processes
that occur during the
reception of information.
 A primary process in learning
is subsumption in which new
material is related to relevant
ideas in the existing cognitive
structure on a non-verbatim
basis (previous knowledge)

5. The processes of meaningful
learning:
 Ausubel proposed four processes by which
meaningful learning occur:
Derivative Subsumption
Correlative Subsumption
Superordinate Learning
Combinatorial Learning

6. Meaningful Learning Theory
 Describes the
situation in which
the new information
pupils learn is an
instance or example
of a concept that
pupils have already
learned.
 More valuable
learning than that of
derivative
subsumption, since
it enriches the
higher-level concept.
Derivative
Subsumption
Correlative
Subsumption

7. Meaningful Learning Theory
 In this case, you
already knew a lot of
examples of the
concept, but you did
not know the
concept until it was
taught to pupils
 It describes a process
by which the new idea
is derived from
another idea that is
comes from his
previous knowledge
(in a different, but
related, “branch”)
 Students could think
of this as learning by
analogy
Superordinate
Learning
Combinatorial
Learning

8. Principles of Ausubel’s Meaningful
Reception Learning Theory
Within a classroom setting include:
 The most general ideas of a subject should be
presented first and then progressively differentiated
in terms of detail and specificity.
 Instructional materials should attempt to integrate
new material with previously
presented information through comparisons and
cross-referencing of new and old
ideas.

9. Principles of Ausubel’s Meaningful
Reception Learning Theory
 Instructors should incorporate advance organizers
when teaching a new concept.
 Instructors should use a number of examples and
focus on both similarities and differences.
 Classroom application of Ausubel's theory should
discourage rote learning of materials that can be
learned more meaningfully.
 The most important single factor influencing
learning is what the learner already knows.

14. Summary
 For Ausubel, meaningful learning is a process that
related new information relevant to the concepts
contained in a person’s cognitive structure.
 In order to be meaningful to students ‘learning,
then learning should be linked and relevant to
students’ cognitive structures.
 Relevance to students’ cognitive structures can
happen when we pay attention to early knowledge
of the concepts that preceded the concept to be
learned.

15. Summary
 It is important for students to construct
knowledge through learning.
 The essential theory of meaningful learning is
a teaching which Ausubel enables students
can associate the beginning of knowledge with
new knowledge that will learn and how
teachers can facilitate learning by preparing
the facility as a presentation of the subject
matter which allows students to build
knowledge in discovery learning activities.