The Effects of Gesture Associated Learning

On September 24th, Elizabeth Wakefield presented her findings on the role that gesture plays in learning. Her research focused specifically on gesture learning with math problems. I was interested to see if there had been more research done about the effects of gesture learning in other subjects. A study preformed at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by Professor Huang and colleagues took a look at the effect gesture learning had on learning a new language. Groups of students were shown 18 vocabulary words in Mandarin. Six words were shown with arbitrary gestures, six with iconic gestures, and six with no gestures. The students were later tested after a couple learning sessions and the results showed an 8-10 percent better recall of the word's meaning with the words that had random or iconic hand gestures associated with them. This suggests that learning a foreign language can be easier with the use of gesture association. Seeing the instructor's hand movements created an image in the students' minds of the word.

Professor Wakefield's research talks more about the use of hand gestures to help facilitate learning how to solve a problem, as opposed to Huang's research which is more about gesture associated learning. Wakefield used a gesture technique, called grouping, to help guide the students. While Huang used repetitive, linked gesture to help facilitate memorization of words. Both of these studies show there is a link between gesture and learning. And that learning can be greatly aided by gesture and improve students' ability to learn and memorize.

Work Cited

Huang, X., Kim, N., & Christianson, K. (2018). Gesture and vocabulary learning in a second language OASIS Summary of Huang et al. in Language Learning. https://oasis-database.org