How Gestures Contribute to Learning

Learning is a continuous process that occurs in everyone’s life. People can learn in many ways—by watching, listening, and even gesturing. Gestures are hand movements that communicate ideas, which are often done simultaneously while speaking. Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield-Connell discusses that gestures are significantly helpful in the learning process for children because it directs their visual attention and engage the motor system. In her study, she used eye tracking to explore children’s learning during math instruction with or without gestures. The results showed that children learned better through speech and gesture because they focused more on the problem instead of looking at the instructor; however, this did not predict learning. Speech and following along with gesture leads to learning. In addition to this study, Dr. Wakefield-Connell also looked at children’s brain activity during gesture learning. This study showed that children taught with gestures and speech (in comparison to children who were taught with speech only) results in activation of frontal parietal areas and have greater activation in brain regions involved in action-based learning.

Not only does gesturing help us learn, but it also helps us think. In the article “Hands in the Air: How Gesturing Helps Us to Think,” Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow states that gestures reveal children’s implicit knowledge and change how they think. In her study, she had a group of children who used hand gestures while explaining their answers to a math problem and another group who used speech only. When they were given a new set of problems to complete, children who used gestures previously were able to answer problems more correctly. It demonstrated that gestures can help children retain learned information. In addition to this, her studies also imply that gestures have helped children work through difficult problems. The aide of gestures were proven to help with thinking and reduce the mental load from the mind.

Gesturing is a natural occurrence—it happens so often that we don’t even notice that we’re doing it half the time. Based on previous studies, it is evident that gestures improve the process of learning because it allows us to attain information longer and better. Both Wakefield-Connell and Golden-Meadow’s works are relevant because it can improve the way instructors teach as well as providing children a more efficient way of learning and attaining new material.

Works Cited:

Goldin-Meadow, Susan. “Hands in the Air: How Gesturing Helps Us to Think.” Scientific American, Scientific American Mind. 1 Sept. 2010. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hands-in-the-air/.

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;e12664. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12664