UCLA

The idea that people learn from sensorimotor experiences, whether through performing actions themselves or observing others, has garnered increasing attention from researchers in psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and education. In teaching and learning research, a key question is whether these sensorimotor experiences can help students acquire abstract concepts in complex domains. Past research has revealed promising evidence in various domains such as mathematics and physics regarding the benefit of incorporating some sort of bodily actions into learning. However, our understanding of how different types of bodily experiences impact learning is still nascent. Questions remain about the effect, mechanism, and practical application of using embodied experiences to help learners learn abstract knowledge in complex domains. These inquiries lead to a series of laboratory experiments and classroom interventions that I will present across three chapters, each written as a discrete empirical article that either has been published or is in preparation for publication. Across three chapters, the work was conducted in the field of statistics and data science education, which was picked because the concepts are intrinsically abstract and difficult, but they simultaneously do not require a sophisticated mathematical background. The first question focuses on the effect of observing bodily actions. Whereas abundant evidence has demonstrated the effect of performing actions, the concept of observing actions is less explored. Would simply observing hands-on representations lead to an increase in learning? This question is answered in Chapter 1, a published work that demonstrates the efficacy of observing hands-on representations in improving students’ understanding of randomness and the shuffle() function in R programming used to simulate randomness. The second question focuses on the mechanism underlying the effect—an embodied representation has more sensorimotor engagement and visuospatial concreteness than an abstract representation, but does sensorimotor engagement offer a unique benefit beyond visuospatial concreteness? Chapter 2 is a manuscript under review that reports on a laboratory experiment designed to isolate the effect of sensorimotor engagement. The findings suggest that sensorimotor engagement offers a unique benefit beyond visuospatial concreteness by helping learners develop more robust visuospatial representations. The last question relates to the practical application of different types of embodied interventions when we have learners with diverse levels of prior knowledge in the classroom. Theories in embodied cognition, along with other empirical evidence in both motor and learning domains, suggest that humans rely on their knowledge of their own bodies to understand other people’s movements. This insight prompted me to ask whether learners’ prior knowledge would moderate the type of embodied intervention (i.e. performing versus observing) on learning. The third Chapter reports on the design of a curriculum-linked embodied intervention to implement embodied activities over the entire school term of a college-level introductory statistics course. Students were randomly assigned the role of a performer or an observer. The findings provided support for the Perform-First hypothesis, showing that compared to observing, performing hands-on activities diminished the correlation between prior knowledge and post-test performance. Overall, this body of work extends the theory of embodied learning and offers practical insights for teachers and curriculum developers about how to implement embodied interventions into their educational materials and instructions.