Application Of The Theory Of Meaningful Learning In Secondary School Math Teaching

As a major discipline, math is widely applied in various fields and closely related to students’ study, everyone’s life, nation’s development as well as the advancement of science.In the process of math teaching, students are required to flexibly adopt basic knowledge including necessary axioms and theorems they need to master and solve practical problems that may emerge.Knowing the importance of math, both teachers and students are supposed to collaborate to explore new methods that enable us to increase teaching efficiency and meet the demand of our age.Assimilation theory for cognitive learning put forward by Ausubel, a prominent educator and psychologist in the United States, has contributed a lot to education. Ausubel believed that learning should be meaningful rather than mechanical since mechanical learning is not in line with the cognitive structure and healthy development of students, let alone true mastery of knowledge.To make learning meaningful, both objective and subjective conditions should be provided. In the theory of meaningful learning, learning can be divided into three categories, superordinate, subordinate and combinational. Ausubel also suggested that teachers should make flexible choices to select different learning and teaching methods during the process of teaching. Certainly, to increase learning efficiency of students, the process of teaching should be based on the principle of progressive differentiation and the principle of comprehensive penetration as well as the principle of sequence consolidation.This thesis aims to study the application of the above-mentioned theory in secondary school math class. To make learning meaningful, selection of teaching content, compilation of textbook and organization of class should be logically coherent to psychological traits and cognitive structure of the students. The teaching process should be gradually differentiating and assimilate new knowledge to cognitive structure of the students step by step.Meanwhile, teachers ought to adopt various methods to arouse students’ interest and help them to cultivate an intention of meaningful learning which enables students to generate thirst for knowledge of math and achieve meaningful learning through connection and interaction between new knowledge and the old.In addition to the previous three principles, the strategy of advance organizer proposed by Ausubel also plays an important guiding role in learning. At the same time, this thesis introduces the application of the three types of learning, three principles and the strategy of advance organizer in secondary math teaching and learning. The author holds that more opportunities should be given to students to explore knowledge of math in real life and connect it with practical matters in order to arouse interest and enhance their motivation for learning.