Let’s do the time warp again – embodied learning of the concept of time in an applied school setting

This article has been accepted for publication in Interactive Learning Environments, published by Taylor & Francis. Embodied Cognition approaches suggest that movements influence the understanding of abstract concepts such as time. It follows that moving the arms as watch hands should boost children’s learning to read the clock. In a school setting, we compared three learning conditions: an embodied (movement) condition, an interactive App condition, and a text condition. Age, self-reported enjoyment, and group size were controlled. In a clock-time-test, the embodied condition resulted in better performances than the mean of the other conditions in small, but not in large groups. This innovative, theory-informed approach may advance learning of abstract concepts in children.