Education Column

While some of these ideas might seem corny, or even ridiculous, they can be quite effective at helping students learn. In fact, the sillier the activity is, the more likely the students are to remember it. Retention of course material is what we are after, right? Even if a particular kinesthetic learning technique isn´t very effective at clarifying its target concept, your students might still appreciate being able to stand up and stretch for five minutes. You might lose five minutes of lecture time, but then you might gain ten more minutes of focused attention. Isn´t that a good tradeoff? If you have used kinesthetic learning in your classes and you are willing to share your results (good or bad) with other instructors, please let me know. If and when I have collected a few new examples, I will include them in a future column. Also, please let me know if you try any of the techniques I have described here. I would like to know how they worked out in your course.