Hand movement improves word memory of Grade 1 students

ABSTRACT

Moving the hands or chewing in the encoding stage enhances memory, because body movement activates the frontal cortex, which is crucial to the memory process. However, how hand movement facilitates word memory in an applied setting and whether it produces long-term effects remain unclear. Grade 1 students studied 15 new words through different strategies: fun hand movement, verbal repetition, listening (Study 1), copying words, and pure hand movement (Study 2). They recalled the words immediately, 25 minutes later, and 3 days later. Their memory performance was the best under the pure hand movement condition and the poorest under the verbal repetition and listening conditions. Moreover, the 3-day delayed recall was similar to the immediate recall under the pure hand movement condition, whereas recall decreased after 3 days in other conditions. These findings demonstrate effective strategies of word memory for vocabulary learning in classroom settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Hand movement
• memory
• vocabulary learning
• verbal repetition
• word copying

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Open Science Framework at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/NFSP7.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tsz Wing Tsang

Tsz Wing Tsang is a research assistant in the Department of Applied Social Sciences of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include children’s learning strategies, school performance, and educational psychology.

Hui Jing Lu

Hui Jing Lu is an Associate Professor of the Department of Applied Social Sciences of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests focus on social and cognitive development, include how children understand others’ mind, children’s autobiographical memory, child socialization and parenting, children’s sharing behaviors, and adolescent risk-taking.