For a long time now, there’s been speculation around the fact that purposeful use of hand and arm motion during speech, or gesturing, is a useful tool when it comes to helping someone learn a topic. It has been especially advantageous in classroom settings, where teachers stand in front of whiteboards explaining important concepts and students focus on understanding them. Its importance is now being studied by scientists and psychologists as they try to gain a better understanding of what exactly occurs in the brain and body that makes gestures so valuable.
One paper that focused on this topic is by Wakefield et al. 2018, and demonstrated that gestures that accompanied speech when students were trying to learn did improve retention and understanding compared to exclusively speech. In this study, the authors listed the more usual reasons for this to occur such as the way visual attention is allocated and looking more to the problem versus the instructor. The use of an eye tracker allowed the researchers to follow the activity of the students’ eyes around the AOI (Area of Interest), so it proved that their visual allocation did differ when the instructor’s mode of teaching was not only speech. However, they also discussed that this is not the sole contribution provided by gesturing to learning - there’s more going on in our brains than just the redirection of visual attention, which they were able to conclude after doing their various experimental components and analysis. The authors were not sure what exactly makes gesturing so powerful in the brain, but their study did set in stone the significance of it in a school environment. It proved that students retained the information with stability rather than cramming and forgetting shortly after.
Another study done by a research team in UCLA lead by Icy Yunyi Zhang took this concept a step further by aiming to test the boundaries of the effect of gestures: their experimental group of participants were told to gesture in a certain way as they watched a video explaining statistical models. Afterwards, the different groups had to take a quiz on what they had just learned. This flipped the common script of participants watching an instructor gesture on its head, and the researchers found that the participants who completed the movement did better on the post-video quiz, demonstrating a new side to the gestures and learning conversation: it doesn't only help when teachers gesture, but when students do as well! The theory discussed by this team was that it kept the attention of the learners engaged since they had to put effort into forming the correct gestures based on the content of what they were learning. Since the cognitive processes behind learning are not yet fully understood, the reasons for why gesturing is so helpful to learning likely go far beyond what science has begun to broach, which is what Wakefield et al. stated as well.
If you’re a teacher, there’s no harm in giving this method a try for your next lesson. In addition to making sure you are actively gesturing, incorporate specific content-related gestures into the lessons for students to try. This will assist in their cognitive processes to understand and integrate the information, thus allowing them to earn better grades and set them on the path to success.
References
Hutson, Matthew. “Students Who Gesture during Learning 'Grasp' Concepts Better.” Scientific American, Scientific American, 13 Apr. 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/students-who-gesture-during-learning-grasp-concepts-better/.
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 Nov;21(6):e12664. doi: 10.1111/desc.12664. Epub 2018 Apr 16. PMID: 29663574; PMCID: PMC6191377.
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