Psychomotricity fostering preschool pupils’ long-term learning

• Grounded psychomotor skills is a methodological strategy that improves learning. • Pupils’ moderate emotional involvement in psychomotor skills is a key for learning. • Symbolic motor contexts, rich in curricular content, enhance long-term learning. • Incorporating motor skills into learning methodologies allows better pupil's outcomes. • Psychomotricity is framed in the postulates of embodiment theory. The present research analyses whether an intervention based on employing a grounded psychomotor methodology favours meaningful learning and long-term memorization of curricular content in the same way as an expository methodology would. A comparative analysis between the effects of one methodological intervention and another is performed. The study is carried out with two natural groups of preschool pupils (5–6 years old). The acquisition of content following each of the four sessions programmed for both methodologies, and its memorization in three time frames of 24 hours, 7 days, and 31 days, is evaluated. To evaluate learning and memorization of content, a verbal recognition test and a verbal memorization test are used. The study shows that during the grounded psychomotor intervention, as a methodology that uses meaningful motor skills experienced in an interdisciplinary framework, preschoolers improved their learning. The analysis of the methodological effect was significant despite having found significant differences between groups. Memorization over short (24h), medium-term (7 days) and long-term (31 days) periods of time presents similar values between both methodologies, showing an important recall capacity in both methodologies. In memorization, there are also significant differences according to the group and methodology. The study considers that significant motor interventions experienced as strategic didactic elements are worth considering as a strategy to improve content learning in an educational context at the preschool stage. This study enables us to consider the need to establish mechanisms for preschoolers to control emotional intensity when using psychomotor tasks and delivering intentionally directed curriculum content. A comprehensive examination of the research allows us to contend that although the formative assessment process, which is a byproduct of the learning process itself, has contributed to high memorization results over time, teaching-learning dialogic and constructivist methodologies can be held responsible for very low levels of forgetting.