Meaningful Learning

Meaningful learning is higher order thinking and understanding built through intellectual engagement that uses pattern recognition and concept association, including critical and creative thinking, inquiry, problem solving, critical discourse and metacognitive skill. In this account, learned information is fully understood and can be used to make connections with other previously known knowledge, and because that knowledge is stored as a network of connections it can be accessed from multiple starting points depending on the context of recall. Meaningful learning is usually contrasted with rote learning, in which information is memorized with little understanding or connection to other knowledge, and the concept is most closely associated with David Ausubel's 1967 work.