In 1963 an initial attempt was made in my The Psychology of Meaningful Verbal Learning to present a cognitive theory of meaningful as opposed to rote verbal learning.
This is a college-level textbook that provides a comprehensive and credible theory of how humans can learn and retain substantial and growing bodies of potentially meaningful, organized subject-matter knowledge on an extended, long-term basis. It identifies explicitly the cognitive conditions under which such learning and retention occurs, and indicates how they are influenced by relevant cognitive structure, frequency, mental 'set' and motivational variables, and, most importantly, by the probable underlying functional cognitive processes involved.