ABSTRACT
Students frequently ask why specific academic content is important, why they have to know it, and when they will really need to use it. Educational experiences that recognize the individual and collective contributions of unconscious and conscious processes and design activities that support them will foster more fully integrated learning. Conscious processing is enhanced with support for semantically congruent actions and metaphors, reducing cognitive load by means such as directing attention and cognitive offloading, situated memory retrieval of declarative knowledge and rules, and reflection. Assessment practices also benefit from an embodied perspective. Teachers can develop helpful formative assessment practices by attending to students’ fluency with pattern recognition and procedures, and with students’ production of gestures. Teachers’ emerging knowledge of general and content-specific methods of instruction need to address effective use of gestures to direct learners’ attention, make overt links among ideas, and connect ideas to formal representations.
