Source: Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

Go to a typical classroom, and it looks like a show. A teacher stands in front of the room. The teacher talks and demonstrates things from the front of the room. Unlike a show at a theater, the audience (the students) do get a chance to talk on occasion. But, most of the work students do is done from their seats.

This approach to assumes that concepts are like the data stored in a computer. Somehow, you have to get the symbols inside the machine. Most typically, language is the way of getting information into students’ brains. They use words and mathematical symbols to acquire new concepts.

Of course, not every type of learning is treated this way. Anyone who learns a sport or how to play a musical instrument is expected to engage with the sport or the instrument physically. I started learning to play the saxophone about 15 years ago, and to do that, I had to actually pick up the instrument and use it. Similarly, anyone who wants to learn to shoot a free throw in basketball is going to have to spend time at the free throw line shooting baskets.

Are activities like sports and music really that different from conceptual knowledge? Is it possible that physical experience might actually enhance what people learn about concepts?

This question was explored in a paper in the June, 2015 issue of Psychological Science by Carly Kontra, Daniel Lyons, Susan Fischer, and Sian Beilock. They examined what college students learned about physics based on observing or experiencing a phenomenon.

Participants learned about angular momentum. You are probably familiar with angular momentum from watching a top spin. If you just take a top (or gyroscope) and put it on end and then drop it, it falls. But, spin the top and it stands up for a while, until the degree of spin slows down. Angular momentum provides the force that keeps a top upright. Angular momentum from the wheels is also the force that keeps a bicycle upright when it is moving.

In one study, pairs of participants worked together. After taking a pre-test on angular momentum, one person held an axle with two wheels on it. They spun the wheels and then tried to move the axle while keeping a laser pointer at the end of the axle pointed at a strip of tape on the wall. The dot from the laser pointer allowed the person holding the axle as well as the other participant to see how the force of the spinning wheels affected the ability to move the axle. In each pair, only one person was allowed to touch the axle. The other just observed.

On some trials in which they moved the axle, the wheels were spun in the same direction. In this case, the force of the two wheels adds up. On other trials, the wheels were spun in opposite directions. In this case, the force of the two wheels cancels out.

After this experience of interacting with (or observing) the wheels, participants took another quiz on angular momentum.

Only the group that interacted with the axle improved on the post-test. In particular, that group was better at solving problems in which the wheels moved in opposite directions so that the motion of the wheels cancelled out. The group that only observed the axle moving did not improve from pre-test to post-test. This finding was repeated in classroom study and similar results were observed.

Another version of this study did the same thing, but participants performed a test of angular momentum while in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner. Functional MRI measures blood flow in the brain as people perform particular tasks. More blood flows to areas of the brain that are particularly active performing a particular task.

Once again in this study, participants who got experience with the axle did better on a post-test than those who only observed. In the fMRI scan, participants who experienced the movement of the axle showed more brain activity in areas of the brain associated with movement than those who just observed the axle. Statistical analysis demonstrated that this difference in brain activity could account for the difference in test performance.

What are people learning on the basis of their physical experience?

A lot of research over the past 30 years has examined what people know about the physical world around them. This work suggests that people have a qualitative understanding of the way the world works. For example, people understand that gravity makes things fall, but they do not really understand the way objects accelerate as they fall.

In the case of angular momentum, there is a qualitative difference between what happens when there is an axle with two wheels spinning in the same direction and an axle with two wheels spinning in opposite directions. In the first case, the forces add up, and in the second, they cancel each other out.

When people experience holding the axle for themselves, they feel this difference between the forces adding and cancelling out. And they learn that difference quickly. But, they still do not get a quantitative understanding of how the speed of the wheel and the mass of that wheel affect the amount of force. That requires learning the formulas for angular momentum.

So, having real bodily experiences with things can teach us a lot about the world around us. Those experiences should become a common part of classroom experiences (and learning experiences in general). At the same time it is also important to understand what people can and cannot learn from these bodily experiences. In this way, real experiences can be combined with conceptual exercises to maximize what people learn about new areas of study.

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