Meaningful Learning: All You Need to Know

August 19, 2022

One thing we can be proud of is when we learn something new and use it in our daily lives. Almost all learning is about making connections between what you already know and what you are learning.

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The good thing about this learning is that you can’t just remember it. You have probably already forgotten something you were trying to remember. This is because you can’t connect what’s new to what you already know.

David Ausubel, an American psychologist, was a great thinker about how people learn things that are important to them. We’ll explain this idea in more detail and give you some examples to help you understand it better.

Meaningful learning: new information

In 1963, Ausubel came up with this way of learning. He was born in New York in 1918 to a Jewish couple who had moved there from Central Europe. His ideas about education changed the world. For him, it was important to understand why each person thought the way they did. The above, to behave in this way.

The idea of “significant learning” specifically refers to how we can learn new things by using what we already know.

You may have learned the above things by doing them or by reading about them. But what’s important is that the new information fits with what we already know. It’s a way to learn that also sticks with you in the long run.

Ausubel said that as people, we only know a certain amount of things. That is, we can remember some things, but we can also forget them as time goes by.

The benefit of learning that is meaningful is that it is real. That is, you don’t learn knowledge in a literal sense.

The things David Ausubel has done

Ausubel’s ideas are important in a number of ways. How to think about the fact that we learn new things every day and that this helps us connect what we already know with what we learn.

He was trying to make it clear that no one learns something from scratch. This is important because making connections between what we learn and what we already know can help us understand what we are learning.

He also thought it was important that we learn from people who are doing things. That is, we learn by finding out new things, and we can compare and contrast what we’ve learned with what we already know.

In the end, it’s up to us to build and cement what we learn in our brains and figure out what it all means.

Now look at the kinds of learning that Ausubel thinks are meaningful.

Types of meaningful learning

There are three types of important learning, according to the American psychologist:

Representations.
Concepts.
Representations of propositions

When we learn new words, we do this kind of learning. It’s mostly found in boys and girls. For instance, they learn the word “ball” at the same time they see a ball.

Concepts: Concepts are learned in a meaningful way when they are taken in through an event or situation. It comes from real-life events.

We learn what a rugby ball is by watching a game. This is an example of how concepts can be learned in a way that helps us understand everything. Or, we play and learn the rules and how to move around a field.

Propositions: Sometimes, a new big idea is connected to a few smaller ones. This is what we learn when we put together and connect small ideas with a bigger one.

The idea of global warming is a good example of this. When you think about things like polluting transportation, too much trash, cutting down trees, wasting water and electricity, etc., you can get a good understanding of the problem.

For a simple example, both boys and girls might connect bricks, cement, rods, a worker, and a house with a garden.

Meaningful learning is important because it makes you better at things. It can make people more interested. Learning because you want to is always better than learning because you have to. So, remembering facts that don’t mean much doesn’t help you much.

That’s why it’s so important to learn by doing things in the real world. Every day, you can learn a lot from interacting with other people and thinking about the things you’ve done. Because, in the end, we are made up of both the past and the present, and every day we reevaluate and change what we know to make the future better.