Gestation effects on Learning and Attention

In Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield’s article on gesture effects and learning, she highlights that visual attention and gestures are influential in helping learning and retaining attention. Another component necessary to guide visual attention is speech synchronization which can predict learning outcomes within the gesture condition. Eye-tracking measures have proven that children are better to experience greater learning retention and likelihood problems when the instructors associate gestures with the speech vs. just speech alone. Her findings indicate that children can perform better with the addition of hand movements from instructors when lecturing or teaching their students. Ultimately, hand gestures are powerful and have beneficial effects since learners can retain more information when it is associated with the instructor's speech vs. speech alone. In Wakefield’s study, she recruits 50 young participants who were recruited, 26 children in the speech+gesture condition vs 24 children in the speech alone condition. All participants were given a math pre-test and all received a sample score of zero due to a lack of knowledge of solving the problems at the start of the study. However, six instructional videos which use gestures to explain the math problem, and specifically referring to direction and sides, was influential on the children as 38.5% of the children in the Speech+Gesture condition were able to answer the math problem accurately when it was readministered. Therefore, this condition indicates rapid learning. Dr. Wakefield describes two ways that gestures have a positive influence in terms of enhanced visual attention when learning. The first manner is that patterns that are obtained from verbal instruction may be heightened or encouraged by adding gestures. Second, gesture may impact learning by working synergistically, by encouraging learners to combine and integrate information from speech and gesture to produce more enhanced learning.

Researcher Pilar Prieto at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona also explains how gestures not only have a positive effect on visual engagement but have an important task in terms of human communication. Speakers All ages tend to gesticulate, and rhythmic gestures when storytelling enhance children’s oral speaking skills. In Prieto’s study, there were 44 participants with an age range of 5-6 from various geographical areas from Spain. Six full narrative stories were told to each participant under two different conditions. One condition involved rhythmic gestures, while the second condition involved no rhythmic gestures for narration of the story. The results of the study indicate that rhymed gestures produced better stories with better narrative structure in the children compared to none.

From both articles, it is concluded that hand gestures enhance learners' ability to learn and retain knowledge. From Wakefield’s study, we learn that gestures learning effects come from not only visual attention but from synchronizing the visual attention with speech. From Prieto’s study, we can see how rhythmic gestures while storytelling improves our oral skills. Ultimately, hand movements seem to have a positive correlation with enhancing learners' cognitive development, and it will be interesting to further study how changes through different cognitive domains.




Works Cited:

Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona. "Telling stories using rhythmic gesture helps children improve their oral skills." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 January 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/01/190117142234.htm>.

Wakefield, E, Novack, MA, Congdon, EL, Franconeri, S, Goldin‐Meadow, S. Gesture helps learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attention. Dev Sci. 2018; 21:e12664. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12664


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