ABSTRACT
When Ausubel’s work came to my attention in the early 1960s, the emphasis on the role of concepts in meaningful learning appealed to me; but it took more than 3 years and six seminars in which Ausubel’s work was emphasized before I began to feel comfortable interpreting his theory to others. His work began to make real sense after a 5-day conference1 on concept learning in 1965 at which I had extensive opportunity to talk privately with him. A sabbatical leave during 1965 and 1966 at Harvard University offered opportunities to study and analyze the work of Jerome Bruner and others. These experiences, and particularly the new interpretations that my students and I were seeing in our research data, led to a growing conviction that Ausubel’s learning theory, especially as presented in his 1968 book, was a powerful model of learning to guide education.
