Does Movement Improve Learning Outcomes? #6

What is the best way to learn? Because people are so different it seems that what’s ‘best’ may be somewhat subjective. Today, we’re asking the question: Does movement improve learning outcomes? And the answer is a resounding yes! Fortunately there are lots of other benefits for children, too. You can listen to this episode above, listen to it on iTunes or Stitcher, or read the transcript below. Below the transcript you’ll find some helpful links if you want to look into this further. Introduction Welcome, it’s great to have you here. I’m Liz and I’m the host of The Early Childhood Research Podcast. This is episode 6 and today I’m speaking to child psychologist and researcher, Myrto Mavilidi, about how movement can positively affect learning. Myrto is Greek, so she completed her psychology degree in Greece, then had an exchange year in Paris, fortunately she speaks French. Myrto then did a Masters degree in the Netherlands where she focused on human learning and performance, in other words, researching the most effective ways to learn. She also spent some time providing psychological support to a children’s hospital in Greece, working particularly with children with autism and with special needs. Now Myrto is working towards her PhD in Early Years at the Early Start Research Institute based at the University of Wollongong in Australia. Her focus is researching the effects of movement on children’s cognition. Does movement improve learning outcomes? Myrto Mavilidi, welcome to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. Hello, Liz. Thanks so much for your invitation! The importance of using gestures Research is showing that subtle body movements such as gesturing with our hands helps us learn more effectively. Can you explain why or how this happens? Gesturing is a very natural process that occurs spontaneously and it helps contribute to cognitive processes because it decreases working memory load and facilitates retention, problem solving and learning. This is based on research, and these movements are integrated with the learning tasks and they are only effective when they’re meaningful or congruent with the learning tasks. It has also been found that if you force someone to gesture a certain way then it can be detrimental for learning, so it’s important that they are natural and they occur spontaneously. Gestures need to be natural and spontaneous You want the movement to be related to the learning, but you want it to be spontaneous. Yes, if it’s related to gesturing, because you use it when you talk, you use it when you’re thinking. So the challenge, then, is to design learning tasks in such a way that learners gesture spontaneously in a task-relevant way. Does it mean that gesturing with our arms, for example, while we’re learning something new means we take more information in, or does it mean that we’re better at remembering what we’ve learned so we can pull it back out of our brain more easily? Gesturing makes the trace richer and deeper in the memory so then it’s easier to find and recall. If you think about children, when they start learning counting they use their hands, they use gestures spontaneously and naturally and this helps them remember more, because the information that they receive is connected better. One of the reasons using the fingers is so powerful is that the load that is imposed by this learning task is now divided between the memory and the hand,