It’s no secret that our students come with all sorts of pre-loaded knowledge, misunderstandings, and the occasional random tidbit they picked up from YouTube. This knowledge they walk in with, what students already know (or don’t know), massively affects what they learn next.
The Power of Prior Knowledge
David Ausubel, famous for ideas on meaningful verbal learning said, “The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.” Essentially, if my students show up to class thinking the Eiffel Tower is located on The Strip, we’ve got some preconceptions to fix before I dive into the related content.
Even if you are feeling behind in your curriculum, it’s not wise to plow into brand-new material without first anchoring it to familiar concepts. If the gap between old and new knowledge is too big, students will either check out mentally or get lost. Even three minutes spent discussing the previous day’s content can get those synapses firing.
Setting the Stage
Ausubel’s genius contribution to education was the concept of advance organizers. These are handy frameworks or big-picture overviews given before diving into new material. They could be a short text, a diagram, or even a simple story, anything that provides a conceptual scaffold. The job of an advance organizer is to say, “Hey, class, here’s what’s coming, here’s how it fits into what you already know.”
If you’re thinking, “But I already do that,” congratulations! See if what you do fits into these four main categories:
- Expository Organizers – A descriptive, straightforward explanation tying new concepts to old.
- Narrative Organizers – A story that warms up background knowledge in a more personal, captivating way.
- Skimming Organizers – A simple “preview of coming attractions,” such as scanning headings and bolded text.
- Graphic Organizers – Visual tools like concept maps, Venn diagrams, or flowcharts.
Before kicking off a lesson on different cultural celebrations, I’d first give a simple overview explaining that many people around the world enjoy festivals with special foods, songs, or traditions, just on different days or for different reasons. Then I’d add a quick story, like how my friend’s family in another country celebrates New Year’s by lighting candles and sharing wishes, so students can relate it to their own experiences of counting down at midnight. This way, they see the “big picture” (the expository approach) and also have a fun, personal anecdote (the narrative approach) that connects to what they already know.
How New Ideas Find a Home
Ausubel’s theory is sometimes called Subsumption Theory because new knowledge must be “subsumed” (nested) under what a student already knows. Four main subsumption processes keep popping up:
- Derivative Subsumption: Adding brand-new items to an existing category (like learning that bats and whales are both mammals).
- Correlative Subsumption: Adding new details about a familiar concept (discovering that certain mammals can fly or live in water).
- Superordinate Subsumption: Introducing a broader category under which current knowledge can fit (a “vertebrate” concept that includes mammals, reptiles, and birds).
- Combinatorial Subsumption: Merging higher-order concepts across domains (like applying principles from physics to understand how feathers help birds retain body heat).
- Obliterative subsumption happens when the original specifics get absorbed into a bigger, more generalized concept until we can’t remember them separately like forgetting the exact wording of a definition but remembering its overall meaning.
Classroom Application
- Activate Prior Knowledge: Begin each lesson by prompting students to recall what they learned before. Barak Rosenshine recommended a short “review session” that can be anything from a quick chat to a low-stakes pop quiz.
- Test or Survey Before You Teach: Pre-tests reveal who’s got the background knowledge and who’s spinning tall tales about the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas.
- Use the Right Organizer: If students have some background already, you might just need a brisk overview. If they’re clueless, try an expository or narrative approach to create that vital scaffold.
- Acknowledge Differences: Socioeconomic factors can affect students’ outside-of-school knowledge. Plan for those who already know the basics and for students who need the scaffolding.
The Challenge
Spend five minutes designing a simple advance organizer, maybe a short story, a concept map, or just a brief overview that ties your upcoming topic to something your students already know. Then watch how much more engaged (and less mystified) they become.
Teaching isn’t about throwing information at students and hoping for the best; it’s about connecting with the knowledge they already hold and guiding them to reshape it. That’s how we help them truly ‘get it.’
Ausubel, D. P. (1960). The use of advance organizers in the learning and retention of meaningful verbal material. Journal of Educational Psychology, 51(5), 267–272. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0046669
For more information on this concept, read How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice (https://a.co/d/a0tZSMR) This post is a summary of concepts from How Learning Happens.
School Intellect 