Effects of 8 Weeks with Embodied Learning on 5-6-Year-Old Danish Children's Pre-reading Skills and Word Reading Skills: the PLAYMORE Project, DK

Linn Damsgaard; Anne-Mette Veber Nielsen; Anne Kær Gejl; Anne Sofie Bøgh Malling; Søren Kildahl Jensen; Jacob Wienecke

doi:10.1007/s10648-022-09671-8

Effects of 8 Weeks with Embodied Learning on 5-6-Year-Old Danish Children's Pre-reading Skills and Word Reading Skills: the PLAYMORE Project, DK

Educ Psychol Rev. 2022;34(3):1709-1737. doi: 10.1007/s10648-022-09671-8. Epub 2022 Apr 14.

Authors

Linn Damsgaard¹, Anne-Mette Veber Nielsen², Anne Kær Gejl³, Anne Sofie Bøgh Malling¹, Søren Kildahl Jensen¹, Jacob Wienecke^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Nutrition Exercise and Sports, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
² The National Centre for Reading, University College Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
³ Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.
⁴ Department of Sport and Social Sciences, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Oslo, Norway.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of embodied learning on children's pre-reading and word reading skills. We conducted a three-armed randomized controlled trial including two intervention groups and one control group. One hundred forty-nine children from grade 0 (5-6 years old) who had just started school were recruited from 10 different classes from four elementary schools. Within each class, children were randomly assigned to receive teaching of letter-sound couplings and word decoding either with whole-body movements (WM), hand movements (HM), or no movements (CON) over an 8-week period. Children were evaluated on pre-reading, word reading, and motor skills before (T1), immediately after (T2), and after 17-22 weeks of retention period (T3) following the intervention. Between-group analysis showed a significant improvement in children's ability to name letter-sounds correctly from T1 to T2 (p < 0.001) and from T1 to T3 (p < 0.05) for WM compared to CON. HM and WM improved significantly in naming conditional letter-sounds from T1 to T2 (p < 0.01, p < 0.01) compared to CON and from T1 to T3 for the HM group compared to CON (p < 0.05). We did not find an effect on word reading or a correlation between motor skill performance and reading. Results from the present study suggest that there are beneficial effects of using whole-body movements for children. Hand motor movements indeed also had a performance effect on letter-sound knowledge; however, the whole-body movements had longer-lasting effects. We do not see an effect on whole word reading.