Ausubel studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with honors in 1939, receiving a bachelor's degree majoring in psychology.
Ausubel later graduated from medical school in 1943 at Middlesex University where he went on to complete a rotating internship at Gouverneur Hospital, located in the lower east side of Manhattan, New York.
He served with the US Public Health service, worked in Germany after World War Two in the medical treatment of displaced persons and as a psychiatrist in Veterans Administration hospitals.
Similar to Piaget's ideas of conceptual schemes, Ausubel related this to his explanation of how people acquire knowledge.
However, Ausubel was a critic of discovery-based teaching techniques, stating: Actual examination of the research literature allegedly supportive of learning by discovery reveals that valid evidence of this nature is virtually nonexistent.
It appears that the various enthusiasts of the discovery method have been supporting each other research-wise by taking in each other's laundry, so to speak, that is, by citing each other's opinions and assertions as evidence and by generalizing wildly from equivocal and even negative findings.
[11] This is achieved by directing attention to what is important in the coming material, highlighting relationships, and providing a reminder about relevant prior knowledge.
[8] By acting as reminders, the organizer points out explicitly "whether already established anchoring ideas are nonspecifically or specifically relevant to the learning material" (Ausubel & Robinson, 1969, p. 146).
This organizer "might be a statement that contrasts military uprisings with the physical and social changes involved in the Industrial Revolution" (Woolfolk et al., 2010, p. 289).
An example which Ausubel and Floyd G. Robinson provide in their book School Learning: An Introduction To Educational Psychology is the concept of the Darwinian theory of evolution.