meaningful learning theory

David Ausubel is a psychologist who advanced a theory which contrasted meaningful learning from rote learning. In Ausubel's view, to learn meaningfully, students must relate new knowledge (concepts and propositions) to what they already know. He proposed the notion of an advanced organizer as a way to help students link their ideas with new material or concepts. Ausubel's theory of learning claims that new concepts to be learned can be incorporated into more inclusive concepts or ideas. These more inclusive concepts or ideas are advance organizers. Advance organizers can be verbal phrases (the paragraph you are about to read is about Albert Einstein), or a graphic. In any case, the advance organizer is designed to provide, what cognitive psychologists call, the "mental scaffolding: to learn new information.