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Re: [Phys-l] Kinesthetic learning (Was: Inquiry)



There is some recent evidence that encouraging students to use hand gestures
aids learning. They found that the hand movements often showed
comprehension before any verbal evidence. Arons also recommends this.
There is also evidence from medical studies that there are 2 types of
memory, explicit memory and procedural memory. People who have a damaged
hippocampus are completely unable to store anything in long term memory.
But they can still learn to do better at games, without any conscious
knowledge of having played it prior to the last 4 minutes. I suspect that
kinesthetic learning may activate the procedural memory better than just
seeing or hearing something.

I did see a case of this when I was trying to help a student with some
physics problems. I encouraged him to mimic the motion with his hands, and
then he suddenly had the ahah moment.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


My memory of the first Vernier work shop I attended is only of the
exercise of moving (running, stopping, backing up, etc.) while
watching the displayed output of a sonic ranger, especially the
acceleration. My thought then and now is it made use of kinesthetic
learning, the best there is, no?

bc remembers his English teacher saying kinesthetic humor is the most
powerful.

p.s. See? It's all I remember, and it wasn't a short work shop.


On 2009, Feb 25, , at 17:51, John Clement wrote:

Heather
Brasell sparked the use of the sonic ranger by her showing that
students had
better understanding of kinematic graphs with appropriate labs.
But paper
and pencil tasks did not do as well.

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