A student learns new concepts such as 'Carnivorous animal' on the basis of words known by him such as tiger, dog, lion, leopard etc. This type of learning is known as what?

David Paul Ausubel, an American psychologist, has proposed Learning Theory or Subsumption Theory which states that learning new information relies on what we already know.

According to Ausubel, learning is based upon the kinds of processes that occur during the reception of information. These are:

• Superordinate Learning: This type of learning takes place when a learner learns an inclusive new concept under which ideas in the cognitive structure are absorbed.
  • That is learner knew a lot of examples of the concept, but you did not know the concept until it was taught to pupils.
  • For example, an inclusive, new concept 'animal' may subsume already familiar concepts like dog, cow, cat, lion, tiger, and so on which already exist in the cognitive structure. 
• Subordinate Learning: It is the learning process that takes place when the potentially meaningful information is absorbed in inclusive ideas in the cognitive structure. 
• Combinational Learning: In this type of learning students could think as learning by analogy. It describes a process by which the new idea is derived from another idea that comes from his previous knowledge. In combinational learning, students try to modify and elaborate on already learned concepts and principles.

Hence, we can conclude that a student learns new concepts such as 'Carnivorous animal' based on words known by him such as tiger, dog, lion, leopard, etc. This type of learning is known as superordinate learning.