Perceiving and performing gestures is one of many efficient ways we communicate with one another. Gestures become a part of our lives as soon as we are born and continue on throughout our lives. We often make hand movements when we talk, count, tell a story or point attention towards something. Most importantly, gestures can help us learn and remember. Regardless of the subject, gestures can be utilized to explain such subjects in a productive manner. Given the current circumstances, it is crucial to find new ways to facilitate the process of teaching and learning for students to gain a rewarding educational experience. One way to do so is to incorporate gestures to not only teaching but learning experiences as well.
In the article “Gesture helps learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attention,” Dr. Wakefield and colleagues studied the beneficial connection between including gestures in instruction and learning outcomes. Children between the ages of 8 to 10 were randomly assigned to the Speech Along or Speech + Gesture training condition. Participants watched six instructional videos appropriate to their assigned condition, were instructed to solve a problem after each one, and took a posttest after watching all videos. Through the implementation of eye tracking measures, researchers found a difference in visual attention tendencies between children in different conditions. The researchers found that participants who were shown instructional videos including spoken and gestured instruction performed significantly better on a posttest than children who were taught through spoken instruction alone. Watching an instructor gesture changed the way participants allocated their visual attention, they looked more to the problem and gesture space and less to the instructor, so they were able to effectively follow along with the instructions. Following along with speech showed an increase in frequency and efficacy when gesture was included. These findings are crucial for understanding the way gesture functions to direct one’s attention in an instructional context along with the mechanisms underlying gesture’s effect on learning outcomes. Based on these findings, we can see clear evidence that children visually attend to instruction more efficiently when gestures are included.
The influential findings from Dr. Wakefield’s study provide supporting evidence that incorporating gestures facilitates children’s ability to allocate their visual attention to the problem being explained and synchronize their visual attention with information being presented by the instructor. Cherdieu’s article “Make Gestures to Learn: Reproducing Gestures Improves the Learning of Anatomical Knowledge More than Just Seeing Gestures,” explains the benefits of not only seeing but making gestures while learning. Two groups of adult participants were asked to look at a video lecture on the forearm anatomy, which included an instructor making gestures related to the content of the lecture. Though in this case both groups were exposed to gestures, only one group was instructed to imitate gestures made by the instructor. After testing participants’ knowledge after learning and again a few days later, results showed that imitating gestures improved the recall of structure names and their localization on a diagram. An important finding from this research states that the differences between the Gesture and the Control group were mainly significantly better in the long-term subset of evaluations, though short-term subjective evaluations suggest that the Gesture group felt more engaged during the lecture.
The findings from these two research articles can be combined to efficiently improve the process of teaching and learning. While Dr. Wakefield’s study emphasizes the benefits of seeing gestures in instructional videos, Dr. Cherdiu’s study emphasizes the benefits of imitating the gestures the instructors are making. Research in this field is highly beneficial for students to incorporate something most of us do naturally in a way that will enhance their educational experience. Given that this topic can be particularly useful during these times where learning has become quite challenging, it is certainly worth exploring.
Citations:
Cherdieu, Mélaine, et al. “Make Gestures to Learn: Reproducing Gestures Improves the Learning of Anatomical Knowledge More than Just Seeing Gestures.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, 2017, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01689.
Wakefield, Elizabeth, et al. “Gesture Helps Learners Learn, but Not Merely by Guiding Their Visual Attention.” Developmental Science, vol. 21, no. 6, 2018, doi:10.1111/desc.12664.
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