Meaningful Learning and Curriculum Design: Ausubel’s Constructivist Approach
Features of Support Materials
- Have meaning in themselves, or parts of the teaching material must be logically related.
- Provide meaningful results for the student; materials should connect with prior knowledge.
- Bridge understanding between new and prior information (advance organizers).
- Be neat and organized for student use.
Types of Advance Organizers
- Comparative
- Expository
Educational Applications: Receiving Significant Learning
Educational Features for Teachers
- Provide information in its final form (reception).
- Present issues using and building on students’ prior schemas.
- Guide students to discover new knowledge (discovery).
- Provide useful and relevant content and new ideas.
- Present teaching materials sequentially to avoid distractions.
- Encourage active student participation.
Student’s Role
- Receive information in its final form (reception).
- Relate information to their cognitive structure (cognitive assimilation).
- Discover new knowledge with provided content (discovery).
- Create new ideas with presented material.
- Organize content and manage provided materials.
Student Characteristics
- Ability to actively process information.
- Ability for information uptake and retention.
- Ability to connect new structures with prior ones.
- Willingness to learn.
Organizing the Process in Time
- Expository advance organizers: Use when students have little or no prior knowledge (beginning of class).
- Comparative advance organizers: Use when students have prior knowledge (also at the beginning of class).
Essential Curriculum Elements
- Units and topics (content)
- Materials to be used
- Activities, techniques, and teacher strategies
Curriculum Features
- Organized and sequenced content.
- Content related to the student’s cognitive structure.
- Classes geared towards reception learning.
The curriculum is the basis for the teaching-learning process. It allows for organization and sequencing as long as both teacher and student understand and utilize it effectively.
The Role of Evaluation in the Process
Types of evaluation: diagnostic, formative, and summative.
- Diagnostic Evaluation: Used at the beginning of a course or unit to assess student prior knowledge.
- Formative Assessment: Conducted during the course or period.
- Summative Evaluation: Performed at the end to assess learning outcomes.
Evaluation Instruments
- Diagnostic: Typically a written test, rarely oral.
- Formative: Written exams, assignments, internships, research projects, essays, etc.
- Summative: Written or oral exams, projects, essays, etc.
Ausubel’s Contributions to Constructivism
Ausubel’s main contribution is his model of learning by exposition, promoting meaningful learning over rote learning. This approach is best for teaching relationships between concepts, assuming students have some prior understanding. Due to the mental manipulation of ideas required, this model is suitable for upper primary levels and above.
Another contribution is the use of advance organizers, which bridge new information with existing knowledge.
Types of Advance Organizers
- Comparative Organizers: Activate existing schemas by recalling prior knowledge and highlighting similarities and differences between concepts.
- Expository Organizers: Provide new knowledge needed to understand subsequent information, especially helpful with complex, unfamiliar, or difficult subjects, but must be comprehensible to students.