It is vital that children are motivated and engaged by the way they are taught at school, and that teachers use methods that help them learn in the most effective ways.

My new research with colleagues has shown that teaching the curriculum through experiential – hands-on – learning can be a very effective way to help primary age children learn.

England is in the middle of a review of the national curriculum, the current version of which has been taught in schools since 2014. This provides a welcome opportunity to put these research findings into practice.

What is experiential learning?

The key feature of experiential learning is that learners actively engage with a tangible, felt experience.

For example, instead of a teacher telling pupils about how vegetables grow and how they end up on our plates, and using a textbook to help children read the necessary knowledge, for an experiential learning approach to the topic the teacher would plan for children to grow vegetables with the purpose of learning about food and cooking. The children would cook the vegetables then eat them.

The teacher could make the class relevant to the experiences of their pupils by discussing the kinds of vegetables they eat at home and at school, and the foods that are grown in their local area.

Teachers also plan these experiences in a way that requires learners to engage with real-world problems. For instance, the class might discuss how hard it can be for some people to access healthy food. The teacher would also plan for children to get further information from appropriate internet sources and books.

In lessons taught through experiential learning children are active participants. The teacher isn’t at the front of the class, lecturing, but they aren’t a passive bystander either – they interact with students to support their learning.

Our research investigated the extent to which experiential learning was effective or not. We carried out an evidence assessment – reviewing a large number of research studies carried out on this topic to find trends. And we focused in particular on primary education.

We found that there was strong evidence, from different kinds of research, to show that experiential learning was an effective way to teach primary school children. In particular, there was evidence of its effectiveness for science subjects, but also that it was useful across the curriculum for children with learning difficulties.

A study carried out with nine- and ten-year-olds in Taiwan, for example, investigated how well they learned about aquatic ecology. The study compared two groups of children, one learning in a more traditional style and the other through experiential methods, encountering the living creatures outside the classroom. The children in the experiential learning group showed better achievement.

The full report from our research shows that experiential learning can also improve children’s wellbeing. A number of studies found that children’s confidence grew; studies also showed that their relationships with each other and collaboration skills improved.

Interpreting the curriculum

Approaches to teaching the curriculum that have a strong emphasis on the knowledge to be taught, more than the processes of learning, are sometimes called “traditional” teaching approaches. Alternative approaches, such as experiential learning, are considered kinds of “progressive education”. Debates have raged about whether progressive education is better than traditional education.

American philosopher John Dewey, who is regarded as a leading figure for ideas about progressive education, argued that there was an organic connection between education and learners’ personal experiences. Dewey argued that when teaching effectively engages children to make sense of their own worlds, through experiential learning, they were more likely to develop new understanding.

England’s current national curriculum, instituted in 2014, leans more towards traditional education. It has been called a “knowledge-based curriculum”.

A knowledge-based curriculum prioritises the learning of what is regarded as essential knowledge by some people, such as learning what a fronted adverbial is in English lessons. This is emphasised above the learning of less tangible elements, such as the skill to persuade through writing. I am not arguing that the learning of skills is completely absent from England’s 2014 national curriculum, but that the emphasis on a particular conception of knowledge is far too dominant.

The personal experiences of learners are not seen as central to knowledge-based teaching. This is because the main emphasis is on directly instructing them to learn new knowledge that has been deemed to be important: “the best that has been thought and written”, as the Education Secretary in 2014 Michael Gove put it, misquoting poet Matthew Arnold.

But of course, this begs the question of who gets to decide what knowledge is “the best”. It also does not take into consideration how, or if, this teaching will relate to pupils’ needs, interests and prior experiences.

An experiential learning approach has more of an emphasis on the development of skills. If we take the teaching of writing, for example, in experiential learning pupils engage with writing processes for defined audiences and purposes. They are taught to manipulate words and sentences for specific effects on readers, and they are given more choice over the topics of their writing. This is a different approach to learning knowledge about grammatical terms to supposedly help with writing.

One implication of our research is that a reconsideration of the benefits of the philosophy and practices of experiential learning could lead to benefits for pupils’ learning, and for national curricula. This is particularly important for England at a moment when a new curriculum offers an opportunity for change.