by Sian Beilock
It has always been in vogue to compare the mind to the most complicated device of the day. A hundred years ago it was the telephone switchboard, used to manually connect telephone lines. In the switchboard analogy, infants’ neural phone network was limited, with only a few connections in place, which explained why they knew and could do so little. As children grew, the number of their connections increased so that they thought and acted in complicated ways, their minds making a more diverse set of calls.
These days, however, the human mind is most frequently compared to a computer that has three or so pounds of neural hardware on which each of us runs many different software programs. The problem with this analogy is that, just as most software can run on any platform, seeing the mind as a computer determining our connections and interactions makes our body and physical experiences inconsequential, like tech support. Thinking is reduced to a programming language, the manipulation of symbols by rules that are carried out by hardware, not influenced by it.
Probably more than any other institution, Western mainstream education embraces the computer metaphor of the mind. Even though the information we take in comes from five different senses—visual, aural, smell, taste, and touch—educators tend to characterize the storage of this information as abstract, removed from the very senses that helped load the mind’s hard drive in the first place. Lesson plans seem to be designed with the adult sea squirt in mind, as if the body is unnecessary, with students permanently affixed to their desks. Physical objects such as blocks, which help teach children about math concepts, are scarce, and even fewer objects are used to help teach reading. Students are becoming more confined than ever to their chairs.
This stationary model of education is counterproductive, because we tend to learn through movement and engaging with people and things in our environment. Take language as an example. Babies and toddlers are first exposed to language in a highly interactive context. A mom might hold up a cell phone, hand it to her toddler, point, and say “phone,” or she might say the word “bottle” as she gives her child a bottle to hold. Most of the words that kids learn are tied directly to the objects the words refer to, and, more often than not, the kids get to hold and manipulate the objects they are learning about. But in standard classroom reading lessons, teachers aren’t connecting what kids are reading to the physical world. Even when using picture books, many teachers focus so closely on what the words sound like that they seldom point to the pictures that depict the objects the words refer to. Reading is taught in a stripped-down fashion, devoid of a dynamic, interactive context that is integral to learning language.
Why is it a problem if words are learned without direct ties to action? One reason is that this doesn’t seem to be how our brains work. Modern neuroscience has yet to find anything like an abstract, completely isolated reading area in the brain. Rather, when we read, we tend to activate the same sensory and motor brain areas involved in doing what we are reading about. When people make small body movements in the fMRI scanner, moving their feet, fingers, or tongue, they activate regions in the motor cortex involved in moving these body parts. Most interesting, when people read action words associated with the leg, arm, and mouth (such as kick, pick, and lick), they also activate some of these same motor brain areas. Both moving your foot and understanding the word kick are governed, in part, by an area of the motor cortex that controls the leg.2 It’s hard to separate the reading mind from the doing mind. Teaching words estranged from the objects and actions they refer to doesn’t reflect how the brain is organized. Because our body and mind are tightly connected, the body is an important part of the learning process.
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Art Glenberg has devoted his career to understanding the mental mechanics of learning. He has a full head of silver hair and a tanned face that discloses his love of sunshine and the outdoors. Glenberg retired a few years ago from the faculty at the University of Wisconsin and couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do more than continue his work, so he accepted a new job at Arizona State University. Same gig, better weather—not bad. At ASU, Glenberg runs the Laboratory for Embodied Cognition. The quote on his lab’s website is “Ago Ergo Cogito”—“I act, therefore I think.” This motto captures how Glenberg wants to develop young readers: by incorporating movement into reading lessons to help enhance reading skills.
Because language learning involves a lot of activity, it is obvious to Glenberg that interactive reading lessons could improve kids’ comprehension abilities. Just as when a dad says “Wave bye-bye” and physically waves to his kid, the children in Glenberg’s studies learn to directly relate the words they are reading to the actions, objects, and events the words refer to.
In a recent experiment,3 Glenberg recruited first and second graders to work in different reading groups. Here is a story that they worked on:
BREAKFAST ON THE FARM
Ben needs to feed the animals.
He pushes the hay down the hole. (Green light) [There is a hole in the floor of the hayloft above the goat’s pen.]
The goat eats the hay. (Green light)
Ben gets eggs from the chicken. (Green light)
He puts the eggs in the cart. (Green light)
He gives the pumpkins to the pig. (Green light)
All the animals are happy now.
Some children were assigned to an “action” reading group. These kids took turns reading each sentence aloud; when they saw a green light at the end of a sentence, this was their signal to act out the events in the sentence using toy objects that had been set in front of them (a toy barn, chickens, pigs, pumpkins, a boy figurine, a cart). Other kids were assigned to the “repeat” reading group. These children also took turns reading the sentences out loud, but when they got to a green light, they simply reread the sentence.
Children who acted out the story had a better understanding of the material than the kids who simply read the sentences a second time. And these were not small differences. Acting out the sentences boosted children’s understanding of a story by 50 percent or more. Those children also tended to remember a lot more details—even several days after the initial reading experience.
Of course, it’s possible that acting out the scenarios simply helps engage students in the lesson, but Glenberg doesn’t think so. If it is simply about paying attention, then you would expect the “repeat” group to excel. Having the opportunity to read the sentences twice should, if anything, help these kids comprehend what is going on and remember more of the story details. The explanation that Glenberg favors instead is that experience acting out the sentences pushed kids’ brains to mimic those of more experienced readers. Just as when we read the word kick and the foot area of the motor cortex comes alive, acting out a sentence helps us connect words and their referents. Children can link what they are reading explicitly to the actions and events the words describe. When the kids are later tested for comprehension, they are able to call upon a rich set of sensory and motor experiences related to what they read, experiences that guide their memory and understanding.
Acting out their reading lessons allows children to connect words to the world around them. Kids often struggle to learn what words mean when all they get is a definition that describes that word in terms of yet other words. Glenberg’s reading intervention mimics language learning in the real world, by helping kids to link words to the sorts of actions, images, or dialogues the words relate to. This action experience also allows kids to understand the varied meanings of the same word. Consider the following sentences, which conjure up different ideas about what the word “coffee” is referring to (that is, a cup of coffee versus coffee beans):
The coffee spilled. Go get a mop.
The coffee spilled. Go get a broom.
Words are more than their definition; they are defined by the context in which they occur. Actions help give words meaning, and they also help to illustrate how words vary from situation to situation. Interactive learning doesn’t just offer “words for w
ords.”4
The importance of using the body as a tool to enhance understanding extends to other subjects besides reading. The cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez have been arguing for years that children’s understanding of mathematical concepts such as “add” and “subtract” develops by extending words and their related actions to mathematical situations. In fact, these scientists argue, much of mathematics, from discrete math to combinatorics, comes from the evolutionary history of the human body. We are animals with limbs that allow us to manipulate objects. Our understanding of math would be very different, they argue, if we were built like snakes, without the ability to easily hold a diverse set of things.5
Consider the word add. In physical terms, it means to place something into a container, group, or substance: “Add cream to the coffee” or “Add logs to the fire.” Conversely, take means to remove: “Take some books out of the box” or “Take some logs off the fire.” Kids learn by experience that there is a tight connection between adding objects to a collection and addition and taking objects away and subtraction. When the verbs add and take are then used in an arithmetic context—“If you add 4 apples to 5 apples, how many do you have?” or “If you take 2 apples from 5 apples, how many do you have left?”—children are able to call upon their previous motor experience to understand the mathematical concept at play.6
The extension of action to math helps explain another recent study by Art Glenberg, in which he found that kids who solved math story problems by acting them out were better at understanding the mathematical operations involved.7 Consider this math problem Glenberg gave to third graders:
There are 2 hippos and 2 alligators at the zoo.
They live by each other, so Pete the zookeeper feeds them at the same time.
It is time for Pete to feed the hippos and the alligators.
Pete gives each hippo 7 fish. (Green light)
Then he gives each alligator 4 fish. (Green light)
The hippos and alligators are happy now that they can eat.
How many fish do both the hippos and the alligators have altogether before they eat any?
Students who acted out the problem, who actually counted out the appropriate number of little toy fish and distributed them to the animals, were two times more likely to solve the problem correctly than the kids who simply reread the story.
But here’s where the data get really interesting: a third group of students, who counted out Lego pieces whenever there was a green light, didn’t do any better at solving the math problem than the kids who simply reread the story. One of the surprising lessons of this research is that it’s not just any movement that produces understanding. The third graders in the Lego group were still moving objects, but these objects were unrelated to the plot of the story problem: the Lego pieces were not shaped like fish, nor were there figures of hippos and alligators to distribute the fish to. When there isn’t a direct connection between words and objects, the power of action is lost.
Interestingly, the use of blocks and other objects, or manipulatives, is becoming more and more popular in classrooms across the nation (especially in more elite schools): students are taught to count with blocks or sticks as a way to solve math problems. Originally created in the early 1900s for educational use, block play is being touted by teachers and parents alike as the new cure-all for our educational woes, and national school suppliers have added a ton of new block-related products to their catalogues in the past several years. Private schools now use their blocks as a recruiting tool.8 Manipulatives are even advocated by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics as a way to enhance students’ grasp of basic math concepts like subtraction and addition.9 Yet while the block movement represents a renewed faith in incorporating active play into learning, how exactly this block play is carried out determines what kids learn. It’s not simply the handling of blocks—or Legos, as we saw in Glenberg’s study—that’s important. Rather, as Glenberg’s work clearly shows, manipulatives have a positive learning benefit when they can be directly connected to the content of the problem students are trying to solve.
Why does the direct linking of children’s actions to the story content matter? Consider the word each, which Glenberg thinks children have a particularly hard time with. Understanding this word is actually quite complicated: the word must be connected to the correct set of objects, and the objects within the set need to be seen as distinct entities. It is not enough when reading each to note that there is a group of alligators. The reader must also realize that there are two alligators and that they are fed individually. Physically manipulating the relation between the fish and the characters in the story makes this individuation pretty clear, because the child has to count out fish for each of the alligators. It’s less obvious when kids don’t do this sort of story-relevant counting. In fact Glenberg found that the most typical error among kids who counted with Legos was to say that the hippos and alligators had eleven instead of twenty-two fish before they ate any of them. It’s as if the kids failed to realize that each meant that the eleven fish had to be doubled to get the total for the two alligators and two hippos. By acting out the story with relevant manipulatives, children come to understand symbols (such as the word each).
Random hands-on activities are no panacea for educational woes, but carefully structured action experiences can help children learn. Kids don’t have to walk around with a toolbox of toys for math and reading in order to get an action benefit. Glenberg and his research team have also shown that, once children have some action experience, they can imagine performing the actions in the stories and still get a benefit. When the connections from words to actions are in place, it is easy to capitalize on them.
Of course, cognitive scientists weren’t the first to tout the educational benefits of movement. Maria Montessori, the founder of the Montessori educational movement, wrote a hundred years ago, “One of the greatest mistakes of our day is to think of movement by itself, as something apart from the higher functions. . . . Mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. . . . Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes about through his movements. . . . Mind and movement are parts of the same entity.”10
In Montessori schools, kids learn the alphabet by tracing letters and, just as in Glenberg’s reading lessons, learn grammar and vocabulary by acting out sentences their teachers read to them. For decades the emphasis that the Montessori method placed on a dynamic learning environment was largely ignored by mainstream educators, but recent advances in neuroscience and psychology show how critical movement is for understanding. This new research in embodied learning helps provide a road map for how to structure educational activities to best help kids learn. The mind is not an abstract information processor largely divorced from the body and the environment. It is highly influenced by the body and movement.
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In a math class called Math Dance, people move in a circle around the room to the rhythm of the beat, while a leader sits in the middle playing bongos. Developed by the choreographer Erik Stern and the mathematician Karl Schaffer, Math Dance is a series of whole-body mathematical activities.11 “Many math-phobic adults and children—young people—are put off by math because they are given symbols before they have a real solid experience on which to base it,” Stern explains.12 Math Dance is designed to give people the physical experience of an abstract idea. By translating math into movement, students and their teachers may be able to better understand numbers.
Schaffer and Stern met over twenty-five years ago in Santa Cruz, California, through dance. At the time, Stern was dancing with the troupe Tandy Beal & Company, a popular group in the northern California performing arts scene. Schaffer was working on a PhD in mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but he also spent a lot of time in the Dance Department. The two hit it off and several years later began creating works that explored the connections between math and dance.13
They started with an activity called Counting Handshakes, taken straight from the opening dance in their performance. As Stern and Schaffer put it, their opening is an almost “vaudevillian” handshake sequence, in which the two characters can’t seem to find a way to shake hands; when they finally figure out how to come together for the handshake, they realize they are stuck. When the dancers first started doing the performance, they were struck by the different ways two people could actually shake hands. The Counting Handshakes activity explores the mathematical concept of combinations. In pairs, students create a movement sequence by discovering the variety of handshakes two people can do using one hand at a time. For instance, the first person might start by using her right hand to shake the second person’s left hand, then left to right, left to left, and right to right. One obvious answer, given that each student has two hands, is that there are four different possible combinations. But students get creative, using secret handshakes to increase the number. In this way, students learn the concept of discrete entities.
