Ausubel And Brunner: Sybsumption Theory

Subsumption Theory  (D. Ausubel)

Overview:
Ausubel's theory is concerned with how individuals learn large amounts of meaningful material from verbal/textual presentations in a school setting (incontrast to theories developed in the context of laboratory experiments). According to Ausubel, learning is based upon the kinds of superordinate, representational, and combinatorial processes thatoccur 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 substantive,non-verbatim basis. Cognitive structures represent the residue of all learning experiences; forgetting occurs because certain details get integrated and lose their individual identity.
A major instructionalmechanism proposed by Ausubel is the use of advance organizers:
"These organizers are introduced in advance of learning itself, and are also presented at a higher level of abstraction, generality, andinclusiveness; and since the substantive content of a given organizer or series of organizers is selected on the basis of its suitability for explaining, integrating, and interrelating the materialthey precede, this strategy simultaneously satisfies the substantive as well as the programming criteria for enhancing the organization strength of cognitive structure." (1963 ,p. 81).Ausubel emphasizes that advance organizers are different from overviews and summaries which simply emphasize key ideas and are presented at the same level of abstraction and generality as the rest of the material.Organizers act as a subsuming bridge between new learning material and existing related ideas.
Ausubel's theory has commonalities with Gestalt theories and those that involve schema (e.g., Bartlett) asa central principle. There are also similarities with Bruner's "spiral learning" model , although Ausubel emphasizes that subsumption involves reorganization of existing cognitive structures not...