| This study is an exploration of the role of physical activity in making sense of the physical world. Recent work on embodied cognition has helped to break down the barrier between the body and cognition, providing the inspiration for this work. In this study, I asked ten elementary-school students to explain to me how a toy parachute works. The methods used were adapted from those used to study the role of the body in cognition in science education, child development, and psychology. This study focused on the processes of learning rather than on measuring learning outcomes. Multiple levels of analysis were pursued in a mixed-method research design. The first level was individual analyses of two students' utterances and body motions. These analyses provided initial hypotheses about the interaction of speech and body motion in students' developing understandings. The second level was group analyses of all ten students' data, in search of patterns and relationships between body motion and speech production across all the student-participants. Finally, a third level of analysis was used to explore all cases in which students produced analogies while they discussed how the parachute works. The multiple levels of analysis used in this study allowed for raising and answering some questions, and allowed for the characterization of both individual differences and group commonalities. The findings of this study show that there are several significant patterns of interaction between body motion and speech that demonstrate a role for the body in cognition. The use of sensory feedback from physical interactions with objects to create new explanations, and the use of interactions with objects to create blended spaces to support the construction of analogies are two of these patterns. Future work is needed to determine the generalizability of these patterns to other individuals and other learning contexts. However, the existence of these patterns lends concrete support to the ideas of embodied cognition and demonstrates how students can use their own embodied experience to understand the world. |
