David Ausubel

David Paul Ausubel (1918 to 2008) was an American psychologist whose most significant contribution to educational psychology, cognitive science and science education was his work from 1960 on advance organizers, short introductory frameworks that connect new material to what a learner already knows. He grew up in Brooklyn, studied psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and medicine at Middlesex University, and took his master and doctoral degrees in developmental psychology at Columbia. He held professorships in education at the University of Illinois, the University of Toronto and the City University of New York, then left academic life in 1973 to practise psychiatry. He favoured meaningful learning over rote memorisation, held that the most important single factor in learning is what the learner already knows, and received the Thorndike Award of the American Psychological Association in 1976.