From the Lab to the Classroom: Effects of Embodied Pedagogies on Students’ Learning of Statistical Concepts

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 ...