Intangible cultural heritage, unlike a monument or a museum object, lives only in practice. It survives when skills, repertoires, and performance customs are transmitted from one generation of practitioners to the next, and it fades when the chain of engagement breaks. Chaohua Wind and Percussion Music, a traditional ensemble form, faces the same structural problem as countless other living traditions: contemporary audiences typically encounter it as spectators, watching or listening to something that was never meant to be consumed passively. The researchers framed this gap as a problem of psychological distance, the sense that a cultural practice belongs to another time, another place, and other people, and asked whether different formats of presentation could close that gap.

The theoretical backbone of the study is flow theory, the influential account of optimal experience developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow describes the absorbing state that arises when a person’s skills are well matched to the demands of a challenging activity, when goals are clear, and when feedback is immediate. Musicians, athletes, and craftspeople often describe flow as the reason they return to their practice again and again. If heritage engagement could be engineered to trigger flow, the authors reasoned, then a brief encounter with a tradition might seed the kind of satisfaction that sustains longer-term interest. The study pairs this idea with embodied cognition, the view that cognition is grounded in the body’s sensorimotor engagement with the world, which predicts that handling an instrument should produce a qualitatively different experience than reading about one.

To test these ideas, the team ran a randomized experiment with 150 participants, assigning them to one of three conditions that differed in how they encountered the music. In the text-image condition, participants engaged with written and pictorial material about Chaohua Wind and Percussion Music. In the audiovisual condition, they watched and listened to the tradition in motion. In the interactive instrumental-performance condition, they were given the chance to perform with the instruments themselves, translating what they saw and heard into their own bodily action. The design therefore isolated a single variable, the degree of active embodiment, while holding the cultural content constant across groups.

The results followed a clear ordering. The interactive condition produced the highest levels of both flow experience and experience satisfaction, the audiovisual condition came second, and the text-image condition came last. Because the data showed unequal variances across groups, the researchers used Welch tests and Games-Howell post hoc comparisons, statistical procedures that remain reliable when the assumption of equal variability is violated. The ordered pattern survived these robust checks, indicating that the advantage of interactive engagement was not an artifact of a few extreme scores or of the specific test chosen.

Flow experience and experience satisfaction were strongly associated in the pooled sample, but the authors were careful not to overstate what that association means. Diagnostic checks for common-method bias and conceptual overlap between the two measures revealed that the correlation contained substantial structure between conditions alongside residual covariation within conditions, and that its strength was not uniform across the three groups. In plain terms, people who felt absorbed also tended to feel satisfied, but how much those two things traveled together depended on which format they had experienced. This nuance matters for anyone hoping to design heritage programs, because it suggests flow is not a simple dial that can be turned to guarantee satisfaction in every setting.

The mediation analysis added a further layer of caution and sophistication. For the two contrasts that involved the text-image condition, significant treatment-by-flow interactions emerged, meaning the effect of flow on the outcome differed depending on whether participants had been in the passive format or a more engaging one. Standard mediation assumptions break down in that situation, so the team used interaction-aware natural-effect decompositions. The total natural indirect effects excluded zero, providing evidence consistent with a flow-mediated pathway, whereas the pure natural indirect effects did not. For the contrast between the audiovisual and interactive conditions, a significant ordinary indirect effect was retained. Taken together, the authors conclude that flow experience functions as a condition-dependent proximal psychological pathway rather than a uniform or causally identified mechanism, a formulation that is precise about the limits of a single-session experiment.

Those limits are worth spelling out, because the study’s practical promise is easy to overread. The experiment measured immediate responses to brief heritage experiences, not whether participants later attended performances, joined ensembles, or encouraged others to learn. The authors are explicit that implications for sustained participation require longitudinal and field-based evaluation, ideally following people over weeks or months in real heritage settings rather than controlled sessions. Still, the pattern is consistent with a growing body of work in psychology and education suggesting that passive exposure, however polished, rarely produces the deep engagement that active practice does, and that the body is not a peripheral player in how we come to value culture.

The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with ethical approval from the Faculty Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at City University of Macau, granted on 20 May 2025 under reference number FHSS250044. Verbal informed consent was obtained from all participants under an approved waiver of written consent, and no identifiable personal information appears in the manuscript. The work is open access, published under a Creative Commons license that permits sharing with attribution, which should help the findings reach the heritage practitioners and cultural policymakers who might act on them.

For the field of heritage studies, the significance of the experiment lies in its methodological honesty as much as its headline result. Many studies in this area report a single correlation and leap to grand claims about saving dying traditions. Here, the statistical machinery, from Welch tests to interaction-aware decompositions, is deployed to show exactly where the evidence is strong and where it remains suggestive. The actionable takeaway is modest but concrete: if the goal is to spark absorption and satisfaction in a first encounter with intangible cultural heritage, formats that invite people to embody the tradition, even briefly, appear to outperform formats that ask them only to look or listen. Whether that first spark can be fanned into the sustained participation that traditions like Chaohua Wind and Percussion Music need to survive is the question the authors, and the field, must now take into the field itself.

Subject of Research: Flow theory and embodied cognition in the transmission of intangible cultural heritage

Article Title: Fostering sustainable engagement with intangible cultural heritage: a flow theory perspective on Chaohua Wind and Percussion Music

Article References: Li, W., Ma, M., & Song, L. (2026). Fostering sustainable engagement with intangible cultural heritage: a flow theory perspective on Chaohua Wind and Percussion Music. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09318-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09318-x

Keywords: intangible cultural heritage, flow theory, embodied cognition, Chaohua Wind and Percussion Music, randomized experiment, experience satisfaction, psychological distance, heritage transmission, mediation analysis, audience engagement, cultural psychology, traditional music

The study, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, was led by Aida Moreno-Rus and Mercedes Ventura as co-first authors, together with Noelia Ventura-Campos, Dana G. Stefanescu and Zoe Falomir. Fifty-two university students aged 18 to 26, drawn from the sciences, health sciences, social sciences and humanities, were initially screened with two computerized detection tasks. The first, a time-limited task, gave participants just three seconds to judge whether an equation correctly matched a problem statement, a constraint designed to expose automatic, unreflective mistranslations. The second allowed unlimited time for students to construct their own equations using an on-screen interface. Only students who persisted in making reversal errors, either under time pressure alone or in both conditions, were selected for the intervention.

Reversal errors are deceptively simple. Cognitive theories dating to Clement’s classic 1982 work propose two main mechanisms. The word-order matching account holds that students translate text linearly, mimicking the sequence of words rather than modeling the underlying relation: “six times as many students as professors” becomes 6·S = P. The static comparison account holds that students form a correct mental image, one professor for every six students, but then encode that image as a symbolic shortcut such as 1·P = 6·S, which simplifies to the same reversed equation. Later scholarship, including work by Jankvist and Niss, has argued that the idiom “times as many as” itself poses a combined syntactic and semantic obstacle, particularly in languages such as Spanish where the phrase “veces más que” can blur the boundary between multiplication and addition.

Crucially, the intervention targeted not just reversal errors but the full family of translation mistakes observed in the screening tasks. Operator errors arose when students confused comparative idioms, writing addition where multiplication was required or vice versa. Structural errors appeared when students placed a number as a divisor or subtrahend of the variable itself, as in 9/P = S instead of P/9 = S, reflecting a shallow understanding of what a variable represents. Hybrid errors combined reversal and operator confusions in a single incorrect equation. Before the intervention, the researchers found that half of the participating students reported translating problem statements literally, following the order of the words without reorganizing the mathematical relationships, and a quarter admitted reading the statements hastily without identifying which quantity was being compared to which.

The gamified tool, built in Unity3D and running on ordinary Android tablets, deliberately avoided the narrative structure and fictional worlds of commercial video games and serious games. Instead, it offered a guided learning experience organized as a path across an island, with eight levels of ten exercises each. Each exercise unfolded through interactive phases: reading and understanding a comparative word problem, formulating an equation with a calculator-style interface, and then receiving immediate feedback. When a reversal error was detected, the tool first applied an arithmetic validation strategy, substituting concrete numerical values into the student’s equation so that the failed equality became visible. If the error persisted, a second corrective layer engaged: a visual representation using containers of different sizes as physical metaphors for the relative magnitudes of the two quantities, prompting the student to decide which variable needed to be multiplied, divided, added to or subtracted from so that both containers reached the same size.

From level four onward, the scaffolding deliberately faded. The tool stopped displaying the relative container sizes explicitly and instead asked participants to determine for themselves which quantity should be larger, choose the appropriate operator and decide which variable it should apply to. The designers also introduced a coin-based reward system at this point, granting one virtual coin per correct answer and up to fifty coins in total, a motivational layer added after pilot studies showed concentration flagging around level three. An inverse task, in which students constructed a word problem from an equation they had written, drew on Piagetian ideas about reversible thinking to deepen structural understanding. Explanatory messages addressed the semantics of phrases like “times more than” and “times less than,” directly targeting the operator confusions documented in prior research.

The quantitative results were striking. After roughly three weeks of training in two to three supervised sessions per week, correct responses increased significantly in both the timed task, with a large effect size of r = .87, and the untimed task, with r = .86. Reversal errors fell by 87 percent, operator errors dropped by 87.5 percent, and hybrid errors vanished entirely. Half of the intervention participants earned the maximum fifty coins, and the overwhelming majority exceeded the forty-five-coin threshold tied to a small financial incentive. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests confirmed that these gains were statistically robust at p < .001 across both assessment formats.

Equally notable were the affective findings. Drawing on flow theory, the researchers measured enjoyment, relaxation and concentration at the end of each level on six-point Likert scales, and administered a five-item retrospective flow questionnaire after the final level. Enjoyment remained stable and high throughout, while relaxation and concentration rose significantly as students progressed, particularly after the coin rewards were introduced. A principal component analysis of the three emotional measures yielded a single factor explaining 83 percent of the variance, interpreted as a unified dimension of positive emotional engagement. The average perceived flow score reached 4.57 out of 6, and flow correlated strongly with sustained emotional engagement, r = 0.661. Notably, students who had made reversal errors only under time pressure and those who made them consistently reported equally high engagement, suggesting the tool works across ability profiles.

Qualitative responses collected after the training illuminated how the learning happened. Forty-four percent of participants said they had come to understand that an equation expresses an equality between two expressions, with one student explaining that they now understood equations “in terms of quantities, not in the order of the sentence.” Others reported improved interpretation of comparative idioms, strategic self-correction through repeated feedback, and growing fluency and confidence. Many described the tool as having a metacognitive function, acting as a catalyst for recognizing their own error patterns and adjusting strategies accordingly, a hallmark of self-regulated learning. When asked about pedagogical value, nearly a third of participants said the tool was directly applicable in classrooms, particularly for introducing equations and equalities to younger learners.

The authors are careful about the limits of the work. The sample was small, purposively selected and non-probabilistic; the emotional data relied on self-report; and the design cannot fully disentangle the contribution of the gamified motivational layer from the instructional core. Future validation in authentic secondary school classrooms, with larger and more diverse samples, remains necessary, as does investigation of whether the cognitive and emotional gains persist over time. Nevertheless, the study represents one of the few instructional interventions ever shown to substantially reduce a misconception that has resisted traditional abstraction-based teaching since it was first documented in 1979. The message for educators is twofold: misconceptions rooted in the translation of everyday language into algebra are remediable with the right combination of visual grounding, immediate feedback and faded scaffolding, and the emotional states that sustain learning, enjoyment, calm and focused attention, can be designed for rather than left to chance.

Subject of Research: Reducing reversal errors in comparative algebra word problem solving through a gamified interactive educational tool

Article Title: A gamified interactive educational tool to support algebraic thinking: reducing reversal errors in comparative word problem solving

Article References: Moreno-Rus, A., Ventura, M., Ventura-Campos, N., Stefanescu, D. G., & Falomir, Z. (2026). A gamified interactive educational tool to support algebraic thinking: reducing reversal errors in comparative word problem solving. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00066-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00066-z

Keywords: reversal error, algebraic thinking, comparative word problems, gamification, educational technology, flow theory, mathematics education, equation translation, emotional engagement, interactive learning environment, gamified, interactive