David Ausabel is a cognitive psychologist who studied learning theory. Ausabel is credited with the learning theory of advanced organizers. This theory is easily applicable to second language acquisition, but transcends a singular application, to application across educational domains.

Ausabel, along instructional scientists Robert Gagné, Leslie Briggs, David Merrill, Albert Bandura, Benjamin Bloom, Walter Dick, and others developed the systems approach which utilizes research on the conditions of learning required for people to achieve clearly defined performance outcomes. The model is based upon and has grown out of a thorough understanding of learning theory and research.

Ausabel believes that meaningful learning is crucial for classroom instruction. Meaningful learning, according to Ausabel, entails new knowledge that relates to what one already knows and that can easily retained and applied. (online)

Advance Organizer entails the use of introductory materials with a high level of generality that introduce new material and facilitate learning by providing an "anchoring idea" to which the new idea can be attached (online). Cognitive
theorists believe that it is essential to relate new knowledge to existing information learned. Teachers can facilitate learning by organizing information presented so that new concepts are easily relatable to concepts already learned. Examples of devices that may be used include: pictures, titles of stories, reviews of previously learned concepts, short video segments, a paradigm, a grammar rule, etc. (direct quote from David Ausubel's Cognitive Learning Theory).

Ausabel broke down the process of learning to three steps: what will the person learn, what the person wants to learn, and what did the person learn?

Ausabel, along with McLaughlin and Ellis, contend that mental structure
or organization of knowledge highly influences learning. These theorists grounded their research on the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget believed that people
actively "organize experience" (online quote from Omaggio, p. 55). New information must be integrated into the mental structure to be learned. Human learning entails strategies for thinking, understanding, remembering and producing language. Language proficiency depends on understanding, integrating, organizing,
practicing, and automizing subskills needed to communicate. Restructuring (reorganizing existing mental structure to accommodate new knowledge) and
automatization (the routine performance of a skill or subskill without thinking about it) are central to developing language proficiency (pp. 54-59).