The Body Learns

For years weve been telling kids to sit still and pay
attention. Thats all wrong.

By Annie Murphy Paul

Sam Herman, 7, draws on the SMART Board 885, an interactive whiteboard system that
uses multitouch technology, at the Macworld 2011 showroom in San Francisco on Jan. 29, 2011.
Incorporating bodily movementseven subtle onescan improve learning.
Photo by Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images

odays educational technology often presents itself as a radical departure from the

tired practices of traditional instruction. But in one way, at least, it faithfully follows the
conventions of the chalk-and-blackboard era: EdTech addresses only the students
head, leaving the rest of the body out.
Treating mind and body as separate is an old and powerful idea in Western culture. But
this venerable trope is facing down a challenge from a generation of researchersin
cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, even philosophywho claim that we think
with and through our bodies. Even the most abstract mathematical or literary concepts,
these researchers maintain, are understood in terms of the experience of our senses
and of moving ourselves through space.
This perspective, known as embodied cognition, is now becoming a lens through
which to look at educational technology. Work in the field shows promising signs that
incorporating bodily movementseven subtle onescan improve the learning thats
done on computers.
For example, Margaret Chan and John Black of Teachers College of Columbia
University have shown that physically manipulating an animation of a roller coasterby
sliding the cars up and down the tracks and watching the resulting changes in kinetic
and potential energy, as shown in a bar graphhelps students understand the workings
of gravity and energy better than static on-screen images and text. This embodied
approach to instruction, the authors found, is especially helpful to younger students and
to those working on more difficult problems. In counterintuitive domains like physics,
bodily rooted learning allows the learner to develop a feel for the concept being
described, a physical sense that is more comprehensible and compelling than a concept
that remains an abstract mental entity.
Bodily movements provide the memory with additional cues with which to represent and retrieve
the knowledge learned.
In similar experiments, led by Insook Han of Hanyang Cyber University in South Korea,
students learn about the concept of force by using a joystick to move two gears shown
on a computer screen. Hans studies show that allowing users to physically manipulate
the gears in this way improves their memory and problem-solving performance on force-

related questions. The richer the perceptual experience provided by the computer
program, the greater the students understanding and retention of the material.
One reason involving the body improves learning is that bodily movements provide the
memory with additional cues with which to represent and retrieve the knowledge
learned. Taking action in response to information, in addition to simply seeing or hearing
it, creates a richer memory trace and supplies alternative avenues for recalling the
memory later on. Movement may also allow users to shed some of their cognitive
loadthe burden imposed by the need to keep track of information. Instead of trying to
imagine what the gears would do if moved, a mentally taxing activity, learners can allow
their hands to do it and see what happens, freeing up mental resources to think more
deeply about whats happening. This is pretty much how we all learned to drive.
From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed to help us solve problems in the
real world, moving through space and manipulating actual objects. More abstract forms
of thought, such as mathematics and written language, came later, and they repurposed
older regions of the brain originally dedicated to processing input from the senses and
from the motor system.
This repurposing is apparent in the frequency with which we use physically grounded
metaphors to express abstract ideas: counting is like moving through space (the
countdown is approaching zero); accommodating two different principles is like
balancing them on a scale. Bringing the body back into the equation can provide
learners with a useful way station between concrete referents and all-out abstraction.
Physically acting out knowledge to be learned or problems to be solved makes the
conceptual metaphors employed by our brains a literal reality.