Encourage learners to make movements during learning as an instructional implication¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 6 claims (6 for) · 1 study (1 review), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 6 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The review's discussion translates its six avenues into instructional implications, beginning with a set focused on learner-generated movement. As the review states, "The first set of four instructional implications from this article focuses on encouraging learners to make movements during learning." This strategy follows from the physical activity, generative learning, and offloaded cognition avenues, which explain benefits of making gestures and object manipulations across domains such as statistics, anatomy, and math.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Movements should be relevant and timely to the learning task, and personal or creative where possible

Constraints¶

• The review predicts making movements is less effective when the task is easy and working memory is not challenged

Target Learners¶

• learners across instructional settings, from preschool to university

Target Learning Goals¶

• improved retention, comprehension, and transfer when learning with gestures and manipulatives

Affordances¶

• Six Avenues Embodied Cognition Framework

Claims¶

• Only low-working-memory-capacity students benefited from making pointing gestures when explaining number equations (review attributes this to Marstaller & Burianová, 2013) [+W]
• Making human movements tends to be more beneficial for learning than observing them (review's synthesis) [+W]
• Meaningful pointing gestures produced higher retention scores than beat gestures (review attributes this to Beege et al., 2020) [+W]
• Observing gestures aids recall more when gestures provide complementary rather than redundant information (review attributes this to Austin et al., 2018) [+W]
• Pointing and tracing gestures improved retention and comprehension over no gesturing (review attributes this to Macken & Ginns, 2014) [+W]
• Specific pointing by pedagogical agents was more effective than nonspecific pointing, which beat non-pointing gestures (review attributes this to Li et al., 2019) [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Use four embodied strategies — gestures, manipulation, body metaphors, and reconstructive eye movements — to ground animation movements in learners' bodies

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Juan C. Castro-Alonso, Paul Ayres, Shirong Zhang, Björn B. de Koning, Fred Paas. (2024). Research Avenues Supporting Embodied Cognition in Learning and Instruction. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09847-4