The use of gestures incorporated in learning is a topic that has been debated over the past few years. Gestures can be defined as the movement of parts of the body to express the meaning of an idea being verbally communicated. Hand movements are gestures that are being seen more in learning environments like classrooms and teaching halls but the importance of it has been debated over time. What people might not know is that learning is, in fact, a form of communication. It’s a form of sending and receiving information between “teacher” and “students- I use these words in quotes because learning isn’t always strictly confined to the teacher-student relationship. There are many ways to teach and present information, and gestures increase the speed and depth that information learning occurs.
A study by Mathew Hutson examines the role of hand gestures in undergraduate students. 60 students in a lab are shown a video explaining the idea of a statistical model. The students are broken up into 3 groups: a control group, a “match” group, and a “mismatch” group. The control group simply watched the video, the “match” group watched the same video overlapped with an animation and were instructed to correctly mimic movements and gestures presented during the video, while the “mismatch” group watched the same video but were instructed to incorrectly mimic gestures. This meant they had to repeat the opposite gestures being shown in the video, for example, gesturing to the right when shown a left gesture. After watching the video, all students took a short quiz, and the results were as expected. The match group performed the highest, surpassing them by scoring 16.3 to 12.6 out of 23 on average, and the control group scored in between. What this conveys is that there is indeed “power in gesture” (Hutson 2021). Students better retain teaching material when they watch and imitate teachers’ movements as they are constantly kept engaged, hence, relating and understanding the teaching material better.
Another study done by Basil Preisig at University of Zurich demonstrates that gestures can improve understanding in not just a classroom setting but in language disorders as well. In this study, researchers showed healthy volunteers video clips where people with and without speech disorders had to describe various scenarios. Participants’ eye movements were recorded, and it was discovered that when viewers had a difficult time listening to people, they resorted to watching their hand movements (Preisig 2022). Gestures created a shift in focus of attention when one form of communicating was either unclear or incohesive. Viewers who focused on hand gestures had an enhancement in their listening comprehension. This finding is in tune with the idea that students who don’t find audio teachings sufficient for learning can find benefit in visual and demonstrative learning. For example, students who can match the shape of a typical ball, shown by their teacher’s hands forming a circle, are able to retain the memory of a ball and better understand it.
The importance of visually showing shapes and sizes comes from the idea that gestures hold information like special information. When communicating, the areas involved in speech production, such as the Broca’s area, are strongly connected with motor control, so speech sounds and gesture movements are processed at the same time and then integrated in teaching (Theron-Grimaldi, 2021). Humans are accustomed to accompanying speech with hand gestures in our everyday lives and this behavior is not only beneficial to the learner, but to the teacher as well. Theron-Grimaldi explains an experiment where students are asked to describe objects and it was discovered that those who gestured more explored ways to better organize their thoughts, which helped in their verbal communication. This practice is advantageous to teachers because it enables them to properly express their methods, which in turn, benefits students trying to process and understand what is being taught.
These research procedures do not address cases of students or learners with medical impairments. For example, although a learner with aphasia can show hand gestures to aid in their communication since there is a loss of ability to express speech, I wonder what gesture learning looks like for individuals with memory loss. I failed to find articles that discuss a learning improvement, if any, in individuals that have difficulty learning with traditional methods in the first place. I believe such research developments can aim at doing a better job of fully covering different spectrums of learning.
Citations
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/.
Theron-Grimaldi, Stephen. “Why Do We Gesture While Speaking?” BrainFacts.org, 5 Oct. 2021, https://www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sensing-and-behaving/movement/2021/why-do-we-gesture-while-speaking-100521.
University of Zurich. “Gestures Can Improve Understanding in Language Disorders.” ScienceDaily, ScienceDaily, 7 July 2022, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220707141908.htm.
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