Meaningful learning in higher education: a review of published essays in national journals

Abstract

The present essay aims to investigate publications related to the use of the Theory of Meaningful Learning (TML) in Higher Education. The central aspect of the study is to identify authors, institutions, published journals, year of publications and aspects of TML used in the studies. The research has a qualitative approach and of the type “state of knowledge”. The corpus consists of nine studies identified in relevant journals in the field of Science Education in Brazil, from 2010 to 2020, using the descriptor “Meaningful Learning” AND “Higher Education” and the consequent reading of the texts. As a result, the reduced number of works found and the focus on the use of concept maps for the promotion or evaluation of meaningful learning are pointed out.