AUSUBEL’S SUBSUMPTION THEORY (1963)

David Ausubel contended that learning takes place in the human organism through a meaningful process of relating new events or items to already existing cognitive concepts or propositions—hanging new items on existing cognitive pegs. Meaning is not an implicit response, but a "clearly articulated and precisely differentiated conscious experience that emerges when potentially meaningful signs, symbols, concepts, or propositions are related to and incorporated within a given individual's cognitive structure on a nonarbitrary and substantive basis" (Anderson & Ausubel, 1965, p. 8). It is this relatability that, according to Ausubel, accounts for a number of phenomena: the acquisition of new meanings (knowledge), retention, the psychological organization of knowledge as a hierarchical structure, and the eventual occurrence of forgetting.

Rote vs Meaningful learning

Meaningful Learning

žMeaningful learning refers to the concept that the learned knowledge (lets say a fact) is fully understood by the individual and that the individual knows how that specific fact relates to other stored facts (stored in your brain that is).

žEg: students are given the opportunity to link their classroom activities to real-life experience

žThe significance of the distinction becomes clear when we consider the relative efficiency of the two kinds of learning in terms of retention, or long term memory.

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žWe are often tempted to examine learning from the perspective of input only, but fail to consider the uselessness of a learned item that is not retained.

Systematic Forgetting

•The second stage of subsumption operates through what Brown have called "cognitive pruning".

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•Pruning is the elimination of unnecessary clutter and a clearing of the way for more material to enter the cognitive field, in the same way that pruning a tree ultimately allows greater and fuller growth.

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•An important aspect of the pruning stage of learning is that subsumptive forgetting, or pruning, is not random or chance --but it is systematic. The notion that forgetting is systematic.

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Examples:

•In the beginning stage of learning language – learn greetings

•At a later stage students are able to converse on a particular topic, say ‘Having a conversation with a friend about attending a marriage ceremony’ in the target language.

•The greetings learned earlier individually are gradually pruned out and the conversation as a whole becomes a larger and more important aspect.

•Now, learners do not have to learn greetings individually as it becomes unnecessary and as they have better achieved the goal of communicative competence.

Language Attrition

•Language attrition = Language Loss

•Language attrition is the process of decay that a language experiences for lack of use.

•Based on studies, certain aspects of language are more vulnerable to forgetting than others.

•For e.g. more loss of lexical items if compared to idioms.

•Loss of detailed names/parts instead of their categories.

•Research on language attrition usually focuses on long term loss and not those minute by minute losses of materials that learners experienced.

•Ausubel’s solution to the problem would lie in the initial learning process: meaningful subsumption of material from the beginning in order to enhance the retention process.

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