Theoretical framework: David Ausubel.

David Paul Ausubel (1918–2008) was an American psychologist born in New York. His most significant contribution to the fields of educational psychology, cognitive science, and science education learning was on the development and research on advance organizers since 1960.

David Ausubel was a cognitive learning theorist who focused on the learning of school subjects and who placed considerable interest on what the student already knows as being the primary determiner of whether and what he/she learns next. Ausubel viewed learning as an active process, not simply responding to your environment. Learners seek to make sense of their surroundings by integrating new knowledge with that which they have already learned.

David Ausubel was leery of the research on learning done in labs often using stimuli that were not typical of school subjects. For example, at the time Ausubel was writing a large amount of the research on learning involved having students memorize non-sense terms such as "sdrgp" or paired associates such as "table-banana" since these were likely new and unfamiliar to learners. For Ausubel this was simply rote learning that remained isolated from other knowledge the learner had acquired. It was not potentially meaningful while schools subjects were potentially meaningful. Rote learning was unlike the learning of school subjects, so Ausubel sought to study how we learn content, like school subjects, that is potentially meaningful. He wrote often about "meaningful learning" and this is why he rejected the research on rote learning as appropriate if we want to improve learning in schools.

The key concept for Ausubel is the cognitive structure. He sees this as the sum of all the knowledge we have acquired as well as the relationships among the facts, concepts and principles that make up that knowledge. Learning for Ausubel is bringing something new into our cognitive structure and attaching it to our existing knowledge that is located there. This is how we make meaning, and this was the focus of his work. 

More information: http://www.theoryfundamentals.com/ausubel.htm