At Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the second-semester general chemistry course for chemistry majors is the equivalent of an analytical laboratory course. The experiments in the course are classified as classical, discovery, or instrumental on the basis of their structure and purpose. To investigate students' perceptions of learning through these three categories of experiments, six students were interviewed three times over the course of the semester, both individually and in pairs. The students' descriptions of their learning in the laboratory were analyzed through the lens of Novak's theory of meaningful learning and were compared with the instructor's learning goals for the experiments. Students' prior knowledge and the structure of the experiments influenced whether the students described their learning in the cognitive, psychomotor, and/or affective learning domains. (Contains 5 tables.)