“Now move like that fish”: Can enactment help learners come to understand dynamic motion presented in photographs and videos?

Abstract

Technological advancements offer new possibilities of interacting with learning materials, including the use of gestures and body movements. The present study addressed the question of how using one's body to enact movements whilst learning about them would affect outcomes. 85 participants were shown either sequences of photographs or videos of fishes deploying different locomotion patterns for propulsion. Half of the participants in each visualization condition were prompted to enact the movements whilst learning. During learning, all participants were asked to rate their mental effort; moreover, their enactments were videotaped and later coded with respect to their frequency of occurrence and their congruency with the actual fish locomotion. After the learning phase, students were asked to classify fish based on their locomotion behavior as well as to describe fish showing familiar and unfamiliar locomotion behaviors to assess learning outcomes. Results showed that – independent of visualization format – being asked to enact the fish movements had a positive effect on the students' ability to classify fish as long as the locomotion behavior was neither too easy nor too difficult to be recognized. It did not affect the ability to describe fish movements. The frequency of enactments and their congruency were unrelated to learning outcomes. Taken together, the effects of enactments in this study appear to be limited to certain tasks. Furthermore, they are likely to be due to enhancing engagement in the learning rather than to mechanisms specific to enacting body movements.