A growing body of evidence suggests that some Science teachers use drama-based strategies in order to promote understanding of abstract scientific concepts. These strategies employ action and imagination to simulate systems and processes that are too fast, too slow, too big, too small, too expensive or too dangerous to observe in the classroom. A small group of quantitative and qualitative studies over the past thirty years has suggested that these physical simulations enable learning in secondary students, by promoting discourse and by conveying concept features through a range of sensations. The field is as yet under-theorised, consisting of single case designs and unreplicated methodologies. This multiple case study focused upon an intervention design based on a pedagogical model developed in my Masters research. This study aimed to explore the characteristics of students' interaction and the nature of their resultant conceptions over four months. Each case focussed upon one of eight Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 classes across a variety of UK schools. In each, a curriculum-based particle theory topic was taught in a double-period lesson. Data included video, participant observations, and interviews with three students from each class collected at pre, post and delayed intervals. Findings suggested that the pedagogy engendered engagement and self-regulation in group model-making tasks, and supported thought experiment-type visualisations of dynamic processes. Conceptual development was found to continue up to four months after the lessons. A model of learning was developed in which social interaction and multimodal discourse promoted the association of conceptual features with affective, visual and embodied images, which supported recall, discussion and further conceptual development in the longer term.

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Both children and adults have been shown to benefit from the integration of multisensory and sensorimotor enrichment into pedagogy. For example, integrating pictures or gestures into foreign language (L2) vocabulary learning can improve learning outcomes relative to unisensory learning. However, whereas adults seem to benefit to a greater extent from sensorimotor enrichment such as the performance of gestures in contrast to multisensory enrichment with pictures, this is not the case in elementary school children. Here, we compared multisensory- and sensorimotor-enriched learning in an intermediate age group that falls between the age groups tested in previous studies (elementary school children and young adults), in an attempt to determine the developmental time point at which children’s responses to enrichment mature from a child-like pattern into an adult-like pattern. Twelve-year-old and fourteen-year-old German children were trained over 5 consecutive days on auditorily presented, concrete and abstract, Spanish vocabulary. The vocabulary was learned under picture-enriched, gesture-enriched, and non-enriched (auditory-only) conditions. The children performed vocabulary recall and translation tests at 3 days, 2 months, and 6 months post-learning. Both picture and gesture enrichment interventions were found to benefit children’s L2 learning relative to non-enriched learning up to 6 months post-training. Interestingly, gesture-enriched learning was even more beneficial than picture-enriched learning for the 14-year-olds, while the 12-year-olds benefitted equivalently from learning enriched with pictures and gestures. These findings provide evidence for opting to integrate gestures rather than pictures into L2 pedagogy starting at 14 years of age.