In his assimilation theory, Ausubel (1968, 2000) posits that meaningful learning occurs when new ideas are substantively incorporated into a learner’s cognitive structure. This process is three-fold: (1) new material is anchored to relevant preexisting concepts, (2) the two interact to produce new meanings, and (3) the new meanings are connected to their anchoring concepts. Central to his theory is this notion of cognitive structure, or the hierarchically-organized framework of knowledge that serves as an anchoring site for new ideas. To Ausubel, the availability, stability, clarity, and discriminability of concepts in cognitive structure are the principal factors influencing meaningful learning.
One hypothesis resulting from this claim predicts that meaningful learning more readily occurs if one’s cognitive structure is clear, stable, and well-organized than if it is vague, unreliable, or disordered (Ausubel, 1968, 2000). This hypothesis has been put to the test through studies of Ausubel’s (1960) advance organizers (AOs), with the fundamental conjecture being that the organizer provides an anchoring structure for the incorporation of new ideas and thus facilitates meaningful learning. The initial outlook for this hypothesis was favorable: in his inaugural paper on AOs, Ausubel (1960) reported that undergraduate students who received an expository AO on metallurgy outperformed those who were administered a historical passage on the same topic. Four subsequent studies demonstrated similar results in favor of AOs (Ausubel & Fitzgerald, 1961, 1962; Fitzgerald & Ausbel, 1963; Ausubel & Youssef, 1965).
However, as the body of research on the subject expanded, an increasing number of studies failed to replicate these outcomes. In a notable meta-analysis of the research, Barnes & Clawson (1975) found that in 20 of the 32 studies under their review, AOs did not produce significant results. They ultimately concluded that “advance organizers, as presently constructed, generally do not facilitate learning” (p. 651). These remarks provoked a lively meta-analytic defense of AOs in which numerous other authors not only noted that in the studies under their review, significant results outnumbered non-significant ones, but also suggested that Barnes & Clawson had failed to adequately judge the implications of Ausubel’s theory for learning outcomes and that their methodology of meta-analysis was suspect (Mayer, 1979a, 1979b; Lawton & Wanska, 1977; Stone, 1983; Luiten et al., 1980). Even Ausubel (1978) himself published a strongly-worded response to his critics, retorting that had his accusers read his previous publications in sufficient detail, they would not have dared to make such claims. Since this flurry of activity in the 70s and 80s, there does not appear to have been another comprehensive meta-analysis of AOs’ effect on learning. It suffices to say that the evidence as to whether or not AOs facilitate meaningful learning remains inconclusive.
Regardless of the controversy of Ausubel’s advance organizers, his assimilation theory continued to find applications in research and practice, with the most notable example being Novak’s concept mapping tool. Novak and his team were compelled by three central aspects of Ausubel’s theory: first, that new meanings are built upon prior concepts; second, that cognitive structure is hierarchically-organized; and third, that meaningful learning improves the precision and clarity of relationships between concepts (Novak & Cañas, 2006). Their resulting tool represents concepts as labeled nodes, and their relationships as labeled edges. Two concepts and their relation to each other form a meaningful proposition. Several meta-analyses regarding the efficacy of concept maps demonstrate positive effects on learning (Horton et al., 1993; Nesbit & Adesope, 2006; Schroeder et al., 2018).
The notion of representing knowledge as a network of concepts and propositions bears strong similarities to
methods of representing data in an information ontology (Vickery, 1997), or a formal organization of information in
a knowledge base. Information ontologies are widely utilized to represent web-based collections of data, such as the
Wikidata database, off of which Wikipedia is partially based. Wikidata’s ontology represents a unit of knowledge as
an item and relates two items via properties. A meaningful statement can be retrieved from the database through a
Subject-Predicate-Object query (Erxleben et al., 2014). The bijection with Novak’s set of concepts, relationships,
and propositions is clear. This design choice affords a potential extension of Novak’s concept mapping tool from an
individual learner’s—or even individual expert’s—representation of a singular domain, to a collaboratively-constructed
mapping of all concepts described by what is arguably the largest existing repository of human knowledge.
Two important considerations come to mind. First, Ausubel’s assimilation theory is quite imbued within the cognitivist tradition—that is, it deals primarily with the symbolic representation and manipulation of concepts in cognitive structure. It says little of learning beyond the individual mind. As it is now commonly understood that learning is not only cognitive, but also material, social, and cultural in nature (Brown et al., 1989), the limitations of Ausubel’s theory must be addressed. Second, as the controversy surrounding Ausubel’s AOs demonstrates, isolating and measuring the utility of such tools for facilitating meaningful learning can be an arduous endeavor. An open task is to develop adequate methodologies for determining whether or not such a positive effect exists.
References
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