Despite growing strands of evidence indicate that learning processes can be fostered by making learners cognitively and bodily active, too often school considers learners as passive receivers of knowledge and tends to ignore the role of the body, thereby providing disembodied and too abstract teaching methods. We present a project in which experimental evidence on embodied cognition and active learning is used to devise a training for learning from text in primary school children. The evidence-based training, which exploits body and sensorimotor information, involves learning of information technology and can be easily incorporated into teaching settings and procedures. Both learning in presence and distant learning in Covid era can benefit from bringing the body back into the learning process.
Psychological and neuroscientific studies highlight relevance of active learning (e.g.,
[1]). Metcalfe and Kornell’s [
Initially, active learning was exclusively conceived in cognitive terms. For instance, studies revealed that being forced to draw inferences while reading a text, as compared to a passive reading condition, improves comprehension and learning from text as well
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as reading motivation [
More recently, several studies have pointed out that mind and body are not two
ontologically distinct entities: they influence and intertwine each other. On this line of
argumentation, those studies have suggested that learning may benefit also from active
bodily involvement. Memory traces underlying learning should be understood in terms
of “sensorimotor encoding”: they store information on the neural states underpinning
the perception of our body and our movements [
Despite converging evidence on the relevance of body-based practices, the school
setting has remained almost unchanged during the 1900s; teaching exploits complex
forms of reasoning in too formal and abstract ways [
We present a project whose aim is to foster learning from text through active participation, body involvement and the use of computers. In particular, the focus is on learning from history and science texts in third-grade children of primary school.
The project involves the collaboration of the Department of Psychology with the Cooperativa Sociale Terzo Tempo and Istituto Comprensivo Tommaseo of Torino. The school board will allow educators of the cooperative: 1) to initiate co-planning with the teachers involved in the project, 2) to support those teachers in the realization of the project, both in the first and in the second phase of the project. The details of the first phase are described below; the second phase foresees the actualization of the project in several third-grade classes of primary school. Indeed, the project aims at devising a training for effective learning to replicate on a large scale. Further, the development of the project foresees seminars whose aim is twofold: first, to engage parents in their children’s learning process, second, to foster a strong school-family alliance favourable to children’s wellbeing. 2
A deep comprehension of a text is tantamount to the construction of an articulated
mental model [
The subjects of the project are either learners connected in remote from home, or learners physically at school, or both. Teachers and educators create an account on a social platform and organize the classroom page to facilitate children’s navigation of webpages. Subsequently, teachers explain to the class how to use the platform and how to share contents, in line with the modules of the project. In this phase, teachers may take the opportunity to teach children how to behave responsibly on online social platforms. Finally, because of the peculiarity of the training, teachers and educators verify that children have the freedom to produce gestures/movements deemed congruent with the text to be learnt, which will be projected on the wall of the children’s classroom and displayed on the computer screen for online learners.
Children will be trained to actively generate sentences containing causal connectives (e.g., “why”, “although”, “therefore”, “anyway”). To improve generation effect, teachers will create on the social platform one post for each connective and children will be encouraged to comment on these posts with sentences involving the connective and based on their daily activities. In the following modules, whenever they encounter such connectives in the text, children will comment on how the phrase connects with previous parts of the text.
The module introduces the meaning of words referring to names and actions that the child will encounter in the following lessons (e.g. chapter of history or science). Teachers and educators will identify the words in the text supposed to be unknown or unfamiliar to the children. Each word will be written on a cardboard, and placed in a jar. Then, every child will randomly pick a cardboard and will be invited to say the meaning. Once the correct meaning will be identified, the teachers will assist children into the construction of plausible phrases containing these words.
Teacher and educator bring out pupils’ expectations about the topics that they will have to deal with, highlighting their previous knowledge about these issues. The expectations analysis is important because it shows to learners how the concepts they already possess are linked to those that they will acquire, thereby inducing an active knowledge construction rather than a passive knowledge reception.
This module aims at introducing the topics that will be studied in the following lessons. Starting from the reading of titles and paragraphs, children will be invited to say what they know and what they imagine about the topics, making a way to favor the free expression of their thoughts. The teacher, along with the educator, will write on the blackboard and differentiate what is consistent with the addressed topics from what is not related, clarifying the connections with the subject of learning. Teachers will upload a map on the social platform and will encourage children to express their doubts about these concepts and the links between them. Teachers will clarify that any doubt expressed on the social platform should be solved by classmates rather than by themselves; they will just give feedbacks about what is correct and what is wrong. Finally, teachers and pupils will discuss together to verify that all doubts are dissolved.
In this module, children will be asked to pretend they are detectives looking for clues: they need to find hints about what they already know in the text.
Starting from the reading of the single concepts, children will be encouraged to mentally simulate the states of affairs described in the text. This will be presented as a training to personify “the film director”, where they will be asked to use their senses to create a mental movie of the events described, as if they were the movie’s character. In this way, children will learn to use multisensory experiences to build a mental simulation able to facilitate deep text comprehension. Subsequently, children will be encouraged to share their mental movie on the social platform to favor peer interaction about their sensorimotor experiences. In this way, children could re-experience sensorimotor features starting from different points of views.
Children will be invited to represent with gestures and body movements the concepts in the text. Each child will be invited to individually read portions of text many times and to accompany reading with gestures and movements congruent with the concepts in the text. Children should feel free to take the time they need to complete the task.
To favor a deep processing of the text, children will be invited to make inferences about the learnt concepts at the end of each mini paragraph. Furthermore, in order to facilitate comprehension of the links between learned concepts and those contained in the next paragraph, teachers will provide a series of verbal clues that make explicit the main concepts that they will have to deal with on the social platform. Before the beginning of the new paragraph, children will be encouraged to write down what they know and what they imagine about these concepts, and their possible links with what has been previously learned. In this way, children will produce the content to learn by themselves, drawing a series of knowledge-based and text-based inferences.
Children actively co-participate in making a written summary of the text. Children will utilize the social platform to cooperate in the construction of the meaning of the text. A child will generate the first sentence of the summary; then another child will generate the second sentence starting from the first, and so on until children believe that the summary will be complete. At the end, teachers will verify the correctness of the summary and will discuss with children regarding the wrong concepts.
The assumption according to which our training may improve learning abilities will be experimentally validated. Two third-grade classes will participate in the validation process. While studying the same text, one class will participate in the critical training (experimental group) whereas the other class will receive school’s regular instructions (control group). The two classes will be randomly assigned to the experimental and the control groups. At the end of the training phase, both groups will be tested to evaluate their knowledge about the studied text. Further, the validation foresees a pretest-posttest control group design: 2 weeks before and after the training, both groups will be tested for their ability to learn from a text; we shall use two texts concerning the same school subject (e.g., history or science). This procedure will enable us to ascertain whether our training may have a beneficial effect on the ability to learn from a text (the process involved in knowledge construction), rather than just on the acquisition of text contents. 3
School can do more and better in making learners active and deeply involved in the learning process. The Covid emergency forces us to rethink the school learning process urgently. In the light of scientific evidence, we have developed a training for learning from school texts. The training was developed for third graders and is feasible both in case some pupils of a class are physically present in the classroom and others remotely connected via computer. Its relevance relies in making pupils active also through bodily involvement and use of information technology.
References 1. Brame, C.: Active learning. Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved [December 3, 2016] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/active-learning/ (2016).