Whatismeaningfullearning

Jonassen, D., et al. 2008, Meaningful Learning with Technology, 3rd edn,
Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, pp.1-12.

What Is Meaningful
learning?

2 Chapter 1

What drives learning, more than anything else, is the understanding of and effort
. - invested in completing a task or activity. It is the nature of the task that students
. intend to perform that will best determine the nature of the learning that results.
Unfortunately, the natUre of the task that so many students most commonly expe-
rience in schools is completing standardized tests. Schools in America have
become testing factories. Federal legislation has mandated continuous testing of
K-12 students in order to make schools and students more accountable for their
learning. In order to avoid censure and loss of funding, many K-12 schools have
adopted test preparation as their primary curriculum. Perhaps the most unfortu-
nate epiphenomenon of this process is the current generation of students who will
complete their K-12 education knowing only how to take tests. Because the
purpose of those tests and the preparation supporting them is to attain a passing
score (relative to other schools), the students are seldom fully invested in the
process, so they make no attempt to understand the knowledge being tested. The
students do not ask to take the tests. The tests assess skills and knowledge that are
detached from their everyday experience, so they have little meaning. The testing
process is individual, so students are enjoined from cooperating with others. The
tests represent only a single form of knowledge representation, so students are not
able to develop conceptual understanding, which requires representing what you
know in multiple ways. Simply stated, learning to take tests does not result in
meaningfulleammg.
In order for students to learn meaningfully, they must be willfully engaged
in a meaningful task. In order for meaningful learning to occur, the task that stu-
dents pursue should engage active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and coop-
erative activities. Rather than testing inert knowledge, schools should help stu-
dents to learn how to recognize and solve problems, comprehend new
phenomena, construct mental models of those phenomena, and, given a new situ-
ation, set goals and regulate their own learning (learn how to learn). Tasks that
require. intentional,. active, constructive, cooperative, and authentic learning
processes (see Figure 1.1) will result in more meaningful learning. Although tech-
nologies can be used to provide additional testing practice, when they are used to
engage students ill active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and cooperative
learning, the students will make more meaning. These attributes of meaningful
learning will be used throughout the remainder of this book as the goals for using
technologies as well as the criteria for evaluating the uses of technology. Let's
examine these attributes a little more closely.

• Active (Manipulative/Observant) Learning is a natural, adaptive
human process. Humans have survived and therefore evolved because they were
able to learn about and adapt to their environment. Humans of all ages, without
the intervention of formal instruction, have developed sophisticated skills and
advanced knowledge about the world around them when they need to or want
to. When learning about things in natural contexts, humans interact with their
environment and manipulate the objects in that environment, observing the
effects of their interventions and constructing their own interpretations of the

What Is Meaningful learning? 3

Active
Manipulative/Observant

Intentional Constructive
Gaol directed/Regulatory Articulative/Reflective

Authentic Cooperative
Complex/Contextualized Collaborative/Conversational

Figure 1.1 Characteristics of Meaningful Learning.

phenomena and the results of their manipulations. For instance, before playing
sandlot baseball, do kids subject themselves to lectures and multiple-choice exam-
inations about the theory of games, the aerodynamics of orbs, and vector forces
applied'to them? No! They start swinging the bat and 'chasing fly balls, and they
negotiate the rules as they play the game. Through formal and informal appren-
ticeships in communities of play and work, learners develop skills and knowledge
that they then share with other members of those coIIlIriunities with whom they
learned and practiced those skills. In all of these situations, learners are actively
manipulating the objects and tools of the trade and observing the effects of what
they have done. The youngster who consistently hits foul balls will adjust his or
her stance and handgrip on the bat in order to manipulate the 'path of flight and
observe the effects of each manipulation. Meaningful learning requires learners
who are active-actively engaged by a meaningful task in which they manipulate
objects and parameters of the environment they are working in and observing the
results of their manipulations.
• Constructive (ArticulativelReflective) Activity is necessary but not suffi-
cient for meaningfulleaming. It is essential that learners articulate what they have
accomplished and reflect on their activity and observations-to learn the lessons
that their activity has to teach. New experiences often provide a discrepancy
between what learners observe and what they understand. That is when meaning-
fulleaming begins. They are curious about or puzzled by what they see. That puz-
zlement is the catalyst for meaning making. By reflecting on the puzzling experi-
ence, learners integrate their new experiences with their prior knowledge about the
world, or they establish goals for what they need to learn in order to make sense out
of what they observe. Learners begin constructing their own simple mental models
that explain what they observe, and with experience, support, and more reflection,
their mental models become increasingly complex. Ever more complex models
require that learners mentally represent their understanding in different ways using
different thought processes. The active and constructive parts of the meaning mak-
ing process are symbiotic. They both rely on the other for meaning making to occur.

4 Chapter 1

• Intentional (Goal-Directed/Regulatory) All human behavior is goal
directed (Schank, 1994). That is, everything that we do is intended to fulfill some
goal. That goal may be simple, like satiating hunger or getting more comfortable,
or it may be more cqmplex, like developing new career skills or studying for a
master's degree. When learners are actively and wiUfullytrying to achieve a cog-
nitive goal (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994), they think and learn more because they
are fulfilling an intention. Technologies have traditionally been used to support
teachers' goals but not those of learners. Technologies need to engage learners in
articulating and represel)ting their understanding, not that of teachers. When
learners use technologies 'to represent their actions and construction, they under-
stand more and are better able to use the knowledge that they have constructed in
new situations. When learners use computers to do skillful planning for doing
everyday tasks or constructing and executing a way to research a problem they
want to solve, they are intentional and are learning meaningfully.
• Authentic (Complex/Contextual) Most lessons learned in schools focus
on general principles or theorie~ that may be used to explain phenomena that we
experience. However, teachers and professors remove those ideas from their natural
contexts in order to be able to cover the curriculum more efficiently. When they do,
they strip those principles of the contextual cues that make them meaningful.
Physics courses are a prime example. Teachl;rs read a simplified problem and imme-
diately represent the problem in a formula. Students may It:;arn to get the correct
answer, but what are they learning? Learning isn't IT).eaningful because students
learned to understand the ideas only as algorithmic procedures outside of any con-
tex.t, so they have no idea how to relate the ideas to real-world contexts. Everything
physical that occurs in the world involves physics. Why not learn physics through
baseball, driving, walking, or virtually any other physical process on earth?
Most con!emporary resear<;h on learning has shown that learning tasks that
are situated in some meaningful real-world task or si,mulated in some case-based
or problem-based learning environment are. not only better understood and
remembered but also more consistently transferred to new situations. Rather than
abstracting ideas in rules that are memorized and then applied to other canned
problems, iearning should be embedded ill. real-life, useful contexts for learners to
practice using those ideas. . .
• Cooperative (Collaborative/Conversational) Humans naturally work
together in learning and knowledge-building communi~ies,exploiting each others'
skills and appropriating each others' knowledge. In the everyday world, humans
naturally seek out others to help them to solve problems and perform tasks. Then
why do educators insist that learners work independently so much of the time?
Schools generally function based on the belief that learning is an independent
process, so learners seldom have the opportunity to "do anything that counts" in
collaborative teams despite their natural inclinations. When students collaborate
. without permission, educators may even accuse them of cheating despite the fact
that such cross-fertilization is encouraged in any self-respecting design studio.
However, we believe that relying solely on independent methods of instruction

What Is Meaningful Learning? 5

cheats learners out of more natural and productive modes of thinking. Often, edu-
cators will promote collaborative methods of learning, only to resort to indepen-
dent assessment of learning. Learners, they believe, must be accountable for their
own knowledge, so even if you agree, at least in principle, with collaborative learn-
ing principles, the hardest part of applying your beliefs will be assessing learners in
teams. Most of the technology-based activities described throughout this book are
more effectively performed collaboratively in groups, so we must assess the per-
formance of the groups as well as individuals. Learners are strategic enough to
know "what counts", in classrooms, so if they are evaluated individually, collabora-
tive learning activities will fail because students realize that their outcomes are
not important.
Collaboration most often requires conversation among participants.
Learners working in groups must socially negotiate a common understanding of
the task and the methods they will use to accomplish it. That is, given a problem
or task, people naturally seek out opinions and ideas from others. Technologies
can support this conversational process by connecting learners in the same class-
room, across town, or around the world (see chapters 6 and 7). When learners
become part of knowledge-building communities both in class and outside of
school, they learn that there are multiple ways of viewing the world and multiple
solutions to most of life's problems. Conversation should be encouraged because
it is the most natural way of meaning making.

As is depicted in Figure 1.1, these characteristics of meaningful learning are inter-
related, interactive; and interdependent. That is"learning and instructional activi-
ties should engage and support combinations of active, constructive, intentional,
authentic, and cooperative learning.'Why? Be=ause we believe that these charac-
teristics are synergetic. That is, learning activities that represent a combination of
these characteristics'result in even more meaningful learning than the individual
characteristics would in isolation.
There are many kinds, of leaming activities that engage meaningfulleaming, just
as there are teachers who for years have engaged students in meaningfulleaming. We
argue throughout this book that technplogies can iilld,should become the tools of
meaningful learning. Technologies afford students the opportunities to engage in
meaningfulleaming when they leam with the technology, not from it.

How Does Technology Facilitate Learning?
Learning From Technology,
Some of the first educational technologies were illustrations in 17th-century books
and slate chalkboards in 18th-century classrooms. Educational technologies in the
20th century include lantern-slide and opaque projectors, later radio, and then
motion pictures, During the 1950s, progranimed instruction emerged as the first true
educational technology, that is, the first technology developed specifically to meet

6 Chapter 1

educational needs. With every other technology, including computers, educators rec-
ognized its importance and debated how to apply each nascent commercial technol-
ogy for educational purposes. Unfortunately, educators have almost always tried
to use technologies to teach students in the same ways that teachers had always
taught. 50 information was recorded in the technology (e.g., the content presented by
films and television programs), and the technology presented that information to the
students. The students' -role was to learn the ,information presented by the technol-
ogy, just as they learned information presented by the teacher. The role of the tech-
nology was to deliver lessons to students, just as trucks deliver groceries to super-
markets (Clark, 1983). If you deliver groceries, people will eat. If you deliver
instruction, students will learn. Not necessarily! We will tell you why later.
The introduction of modem computer technologies in classrooms has fol-
lowed the same pattern of use. Before the advent of microcomputers in the 1980s,
mainframe computers were used to deliver drill and practice and simple tutorials
for teaching students lessons. When microcomputers began populating class-
rooms, the natural inclination.was to use them in the same way. A 1983 national
survey of computer uses showed that drill and practice was the most common use
of microcomputers (Becker, 1985).
Later in the 1980s, educators began to perceive the importance of computers
as productivity tools. The growing popularity of word processing, databases,
spreadsheets, graphics programs, and desktop publishing was enabling busi-
nesses to become more productive. 50 students in classroom began word process-
ing and using graphics packages and desktop publishing programs to write with
(see chapter 4). This tool conception pervaded computer use according to a 1993
study by Hadley and 5heingold that showed that well-informed teachers were
extensively using text processing tools (word'processors), analytic and informa-
tion tools (especially databases and somespreadsheet use), and graphics tools
(paint programs and desktop publishing) along with instructional software
(including problem-solving programs along with drill and practice and tutorials).
The development of inexpensive multimedia computers and the eruption of
the Internet in the mid-199ps'quickly changed the nature of educational comput-
ing. Communications tool's (e.g.; e-mail and computer conferences) and multime-
dia, little used according to Hadley' and 5heingold, have dominated the role of
technologies in the classroom ever since. But what are the students producing?
Too often, they are using the technology to reproduce what the teacher or textbook
told them or what they copy from the Internet.
Our conception of educational computing and technology use, described next,
does not conceive of technologies'as teachers or repositories of information. Rather,
we believe that, in order to learn, student~ shopld teach the computer or use the
technology to represent what they know rather than memorizing what teachers and
textbooks tell them. Technologies provide rich and flexible media for representing
what students know and ,what they are learning. A great deal of research on com-
puters and other technologies has shown that they are no more effective at teaching
students than teachers/but if we begin to think about technologies as learning tools
that students learn with, not from, then the nature of student learning will change.


Learning With Technology
If schools are to foster meaitingfullearning, then the ways that we use technolo-
gies in schools must change from technology-as-teacher to technology-as-partner
in the learning process. Before, we argued that students do not learn from technol-
ogy but that technologies can support productive thinking and meaning making
by students. That will happen when students learn with the technology. But how
do students learn with technologies? How can technologies become intellectual
partners with students? Throughout this book, we assume the following:
• Technology is more than hardware. Technology consists also of the
designs and the environments that engage learners. Technology can also
consist of any reliable technique or method for engaging learning, such as
cognitive learning strategies and critical thinking skills.
• Learning technologies can be any environment or definable set of activi-
ties that engage learners in active, constructive, intentional, authentic, and
cooperative learning.
• Technologies are not conveyors or communicators of meaning. Nor
should they prescribe and control all of the learner interactions.
• Technologies support meaningful learning. when they fulfill a learning
need----;-when interactions with technologies are learner initiated and
learner controlled and when interactions witD the technologies are con-
ceptually and intellectually engaging. .
• Technologies should function as intellectual tool kit~ that enable learners
to build more meaningful personal interpretations and representations of
the world. These tool kits must support the intellectual functions that are
required by a course of study.
• Learners and technologies should be intellectual partners, where the cog-
nitive responsibility for performance is distributed by the part of the part-
nership that performs it better.

How Technologies Foster Learning
If technologies are used to foster meaningful learning, then they will not be used
as delivery vehicles. Rather, technologies should be used as engagers and facil-
itators of thinking. Based on our conception of meaningful learning (Figure 1.1),
we suggest the following roles for technologies in supporting meaningful
learning:

• Technology as tools to support knowledge constructi(;m:
• for representing learners' ideas, understandings, and beliefs
• for producing organized, multimedia knowledge bases by learners
• Technology as information vehicle for exploring knowledge to support
learning by constructing:
D for accessing needed information
• for comparing perspectives, beliefs, and worldviews

8 Chapter 1

• Technology as authentic context to support learning by doing:
• for representing and simulating meaningful real-world problems,
situations, and contexts
• for representing beliefs, perspectives, arguments, and stories of others
o for defining a safe, controllable problem space for student thinking
• Technology as social medium to support learning by conversing:
o for collaborating with others, ,
o for discu~sing, arguing, and, l;milding consensus among members of a
community
o for supporting discourse among knowledge-building communities
• Technology as intellectual partner (Jonassen, 2000) to support learning by
reflecting:
o for helping learners to articulate and represent what they know
,0 for reflecting on what they have learned and how they came to know it
o for supporting learners' internal negotiations and meaning making
o for constructing personal representations of meaning
o for supporting mindful thinking

How Technologies Foster Thinking
Why do these uses of technology foster meaningful learning? It is because they
require that students 'think and reason. In this book, we argue that students do not
learn from teachers or' from technologies. Rather, students learn from thinking-
thinking about what they are doing or what they did, thinking about what they
believe, thinking about what others have done and belIeve, thinking about the
thinking processes they use-just thinking and reasoning. Thinking mediates
learning. Learning results from ,thinking. What kinds of thinking are fostered
when learning with technologies?
Causal Causal reasoning is one of the most basic and important cognitive
processes that underpin all higher-order activities, such as problem solving. Hume
called causality the "cement of the universe" (Hume, 1739/2000). Reasoning from a
description of a condition or set of conditions or states of an event to the possible
effect(s) that may result from those states is called prediction. A baseball pitcher pre-
dicts where the b,all will go by the forces that he or she applies when pitching the ball.
When an outcome or state exists for which the causal agent is unknown, then an infer-
ence is required. That is, reasoning backward from effect to cause requires the process
of inference. A primary function of inferences is diagnosis. For example, based on
symptoms, historical factors, and test results of patients who are thought to be abnor-
mal, a physician attempts to infer the cause(s) of that illness state. Thinkllg causally is
also required for m'aking explanations. Explaining how things work requires learner
to identify all the causal connections among the things being explained.
Causal thinking is really more complex than learners understand. In order to
be able to understand and apply causal relationships, learners must be able to
quantify attributes of causal relationships (direction, strength, probability, and
duration) as well as be able to explain the underlying mechanisms describing the


relationship (Jonassen & Ionas, 2007). Why does a force applied to a ball cause it to
move in certain direction?

Analogical If you distill cognitive psychology.into a single principle, it would
be to use analogies to convey and understand new ideas. That is, understanding a
new idea is best accomplished by comparing and contrasting it to an idea that is
already understood. In an analogy, the properties or attributes of one idea (the
analogue) are mapped or transferred to. another (the source or target). Single
analogies are also known as synonyms or metaphors. One word conveys attrib-
utes to the other, often using the word "like" or "as" as a connector. Following
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans was said to be inundated with a "toxic
gumbo." Gumbo is a complex New Orleans-style soup that contains a variety of
ingredients. The waters that surrounded New Orleans contained a complex vari-
ety of toxic substances-thus metaphor as analogy. -
People most commonly. think of syllogism as analQgies. A syllogism is a
four-part analogy. For example, love is to hate as peace is to --'-. The analogy
makes sense only if the structural characteristics of the first analogy can be
appliedto the second.
In using technologies to represent their' understanding, students consistently
are required to engage in the comparison-contrast reasoning required to struc-
turally map the attributes of one or more idea to others, that is, to draw an analogy.

Expressive Using technologies as tools to learn with entails learners representing
what they know, that is, teaching the computer. To do so, learners must express
what they know. Using different tools requires learners to express what they know
in different ways. Chapter 4 describes how technologies can be used to help learners
express themselves in writing. Chapter 5 illustrates how learners can express them-
selves using a variety of tools, such as databases, spreadsheets, and expert systems,
each tool requiring different forms of expression. Chapters 6 and 7 show how tech-
nologies can support verbal expression, while chapter 9 focuses on visual expres-
sions. Contrast these varieties of expressions to those required by state-mandated
tests, where students' only form of expressions is the selection of answer a, b, c, or d.

Experiential.; Experiences result in the most meaningful and resistant memories.
We can recall with clarity experiences that we have had many years before. The
primary medium for expressing experiences is the story. Stories are the oldest and
most natural form of sense making. Stories are the "means [by] which human
beings give meaning to their experience of temporality and personal actions"
(Polkinghorne, 1988, p. 11). Cultures have maintained their existence through
different types of stories, including myths, (airy tales, and histories. Humans
appear to have an innate ability and predisposition to organize.and represent their
experiences in the form of stories. Learning with technologies engages stories in a
couple ways. First, the experiences that students have while using technologies to
represent their understanding are meaningful and memorable. Second, students
may seek out stories and use technologies to convey them (see chapters 5 and 9).

10 Chapter 1

Problem Solving Using technologies to express and convey learner knowledge
all entail different kinds of problems solving. Learning with technologies requires
that students make myriad decisions while constructing their representations.
Deciding what information to include and exclude, how to structure the information,
and what form it should taRe are all complex decision-making processes. Students
also engage in a lot of design· problem solving while constructing their interpreta-
tions. They also must solve rule-using problems in how to use software. When learn-
ers are solving problems, they are thinking deeply ahd are engaged in meaningful
learning. What they learn while doing so will be so much better understood and
remembered than continuously preparing to answer multiple-choice test questions.

Conclusion
An underlying assumption of this book is that the most productive and meaning-
ful uses of technology will not occur if technologies are used in traditional ways-
as delivery vehicles for instructional lessons. Technology cannot teach students.
Rather, learners teach the technologies. Meaningful learning will 'result when tech-
nologies engage learners in the following: .

• Knowledge construction, not reproduction
• Conversation, not reception
• Articulation, not repetition
• Collaboration, notcornpetition
• Reflection, not prescription

We argue that technologies can support meaningful learning when students learn
with the technology, not from it. When students use technologies to investigate
(chapter 2), explore (chapter 3), write (chapter 4), build models (chapter 5), build
communities.(chapter 6), communicate with others (chapter 7), design (chapter 8),
and visualize (chapter 9), then they are engaged in deeper levels of thinking and
reasoning, including causal, analogical, expressive, experiential, and problem
solving. Technologies are lousy teachers, but they can be powerful tools to think
with. That is the theme that we describe in the remainder of this book.

.} .- : ," ~ :" LJ • r'
. '.. >•. ~

.,~ :~.' :. ":., ::'.~':. "', '.

If you would like' to reflect on the ideas that ~e present~d in this chapter, consider
your responses to the following questions.
1. If learners cannot know what the teacher knows because they do not share
a common knowledge and experience base, how can we be certain that
students learn important things? For instance, if you want to teach

What Is MeaningFul Learning? 11

students about the dangers of certain chemical reactions ill the lab, how
do we ensure that learners know and understand those important
lessons?
2. What is your theory of learning? From your perspective, how do people
learn? What ~re the important processes?
3. Is it possible to learn (construct personal meaning) without engaging
in some activity; that is, is it possible to learn simply by thinking about
something? What are you thinking about? Can you think of an
example?
4. When learners construct knowledge, what are they building? How is it
possible to observe the fruits of their labor, that is, the knowledge they
construct?
5. Think back to your childhood. What can you remember from your early
childhood? Where did your remembrance occur? What meaning did it
have at the time? How has that meaning changed over time?
6. Think about a recent controversial topic that you have heard or read
about. What are different sides arguing about? What do they believe?
What assumptions do they make about what is causing the controversy?
Where did those beliefs come from?
7. Radical constructivists argue that reality exists only in the mind of the
knower. If that is true, is there a physical world that we live in? Prove it.
8. Some educators argue that we learn much more from our failures than
from our successes. Why? They believe that we should put students in sit-
uations where their hypotheses or predictions fail. Can you think of a sit-
uation in which you learned a lot from a mistake?
9. Recall the last difficult problem that you had to solve. Did you solve it
alone, or did you solicit the help of others? What did you learn from solv-
ing that problem? Can that learning be used again?
10. Can you learn to cook merely from watching cooking shows on televi-
sion? What meaning do you make from the experiences that you observe?
Will the experience you have when you prepare a dish be the same as that
of the television chef? How will it be different?
11. Technology is the application of scientific knowledge, according to many
definitions. Can you think of a teaching technology (replicable, proven
teaching process) that does not involve machines?
12. Can you calculate the exact square root of 2,570 without a calculator?
Does the calculator make you smarter? Is the calculator intelligent?
13. Describe the difference in thinking processes engaged by a short-
answer versus a multiple-choice test question. Are they different?
Are they assessing knowledge? Is that knowledge meaningful? Why or
why not?
14. Can you think of an activity that makes you dumber, not smarter? Do you
not learn anything from that activity?
15. Have you ever produced your own video, movie, slide show, or computer
program? How did it make you think? How did it make you feel?

12 Chapter 1

Referenc~s
Becker, H. J.. (1985). How schools use microcomputers: Jonassen, D. H., & Ionas, 1. G. (2007). Designing effec-
Summaryofa 1983 national survey. (ERIC Document tive supports for causal reasoning. Educational
Reproduction Service No. EO 257448) Technology: Research and Development, 55.
Clark, R. (1983). Mere vehicles. Review of Educational Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative knowing and the
Research, 53(4), 445-459. human sciences. Albany: State University of New
Hadley, M., & Sheingold, K. (1993).Comrnonalities York Press.
and distinctive patterns in teacher interaction of Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. (1994). Computer
computers. American Journal of Edilcation, 101(3), support for knowledge building communities.
261-315. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(3), 265-283.
Hume, D. (1739/2000). A treatise of human nature. Schank, R. C. (1994). Goal-based scenarios. In R. C.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Schank & E. Langer (Eds.), Beliefs, reasoning,
Jonassen, D. H. (2000). Computers as mindtools in and decision making: Psycho-logic in honor of Bob
schools: Engaging critical thinking . .C olumbus, Abelson (pp. 1-33). Hillsdale, NI: Lawrence
OH: Merrill/Prentice Hall. Erlbaum.

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