Effects of a Reading Strategy Training Aimed at Improving Mental Simulation in Primary School Children

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of a mental simulation training targeted at improving children's reading comprehension. In a 4-week period, one group of third and fourth graders (n = 75) learned to draw upon their sensorimotor memories and experiences to mentally simulate text (experimental training group), whereas another group (n = 51) received the schools' regular reading comprehension instructions (control training group). Pre-toposttest differences in general reading comprehension, reading motivation, and mental simulation (distinguishing between perceptual and motor simulation) were examined to evaluate the trainings' effectiveness. Compared to the control group, children who had received the mental simulation training showed improved performance on general reading comprehension (in Grade 3) and scored higher on reading motivation (in Grades 3 and 4). There were no performance differences between groups on the mental simulation measures. These findings indicate that it is beneficial for children to encourage and teach them to connect their sensorimotor experiences to the text they are reading.

Learning from split-attention materials: Effects of teaching physical and mental learning strategies

“…Actively engaging in meaning-making activities conducive to building a mental representation such as drawing inferences helps to develop an accurate and deeper understanding of the presented information. Particularly the use of strategies that contribute to the construction of a coherent visuo-spatial mental representation (i.e., situation model-focused strategies) supports comprehension (De Koning, Bos, Wassenburg, & van der Schoot, 2017;De Koning & van der Schoot, 2013;McNamara, Ozuru, Best, & O'Reilly, 2007) especially when the material is spatial in nature such as is the case for scientific or technical concepts (Leopold & Leutner, 2012). Teaching a mental learning strategy to integrate spatially separated information sources to learners is considered such a model-focused strategy as learners receive support in how to use their mental resources, or more specifically their imaginative processing, to actively integrate textual and pictorial representations to understand the presented information.…”

Can grammatical morphemes be taught? Evidence of gestures influencing second language procedural learning in middle childhood

“…Overview of the training paradigm. The training paradigm consisted of activities aimed to encourage beginning learners to create multisensory mental representations of L2 constructions [78][79][80]. Learning activities were spread over several days to take advantage of spaced repetitions, to take advantage of testing effects, and because the content was deemed too difficult to learn in one day.…”

The Embodied Teaching of Spatial Terms: Gestures Mapped to Morphemes Improve Learning

“…Related to mental representations, the notion of embodied simulation has been proposed citing research which demonstrates that both physical and imagined manipulation lead to substantial gains in memory and language comprehension (Glenberg, 2011;de Koning et al, 2017). Although different from our everyday integrated perception, human cognitive neuroscience shows that at any given moment only fragments of scenes are available to consciousness, these being guided and filtered by the demands of attention and task relevance (Cichy and Teng, 2017).…”