Learning through movement: A comparison of learning fraction skills on a digital playful learning environment with a sedentary computer-task

Effects of physical exercise during educational tasks on learning are not obvious. This study examines the effects of movement on learning fraction skills at a physically active Playful Learning Environment (PLE). Employing a mixed-method approach, we investigated whether differences in motivational and verbal helping behaviour processes (underlying learning mechanisms) impacted learning gains. Results from 32 4th and 5th graders (n = 16 with the PLE, n = 16 in an equal sedentary computer task) approached significance, indicating that the PLE group showed higher learning gains compared to the SE group. Motivation was initially significantly higher for the PLE group. However, results indicated decreasing differences between the PLE and the sedentary group. There were no clear differences in the quality of verbal helping behaviour between the groups. Furthermore, subsequent utterances of verbal helping behaviour of two dyads selected in a case-study showed that their helping behaviour was sub-optimal for learning.