The Influence Gesture has on Complex Learning
The use of arms and head when conveying speech has been deemed "co-speech gestures," which are ways of conveying a message between two individuals through the combination of speech and gestures. Gestures at any stage of life are essential for helping even the fundamental comprehension of language. Whether solving a math problem or learning a new language, gestures allow individuals of any background to understand better the oral message they are listening to. However, do gestures only stop at essential learning, or can they be used for more advanced understanding? In the article, Gesture Enhances Learning of a Complex Statistical Concept, Linda Rueckert, Theresa Trejo, and other neuroscientists answered this question and concluded that gestures can enhance student's learning of complex concepts. Before examining the reasoning behind this result, we must examine how gestures improve learning. For this, we turn to Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield and Natalia Zielinksi's scientific paper, Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism, which discusses how gestures improve language proficiency of both native and weaker language.
Starting with Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism, Dr. Wakefield and Zielinksi used bilingual (Polish and English) children to test whether gestures showed improvement in the children's ability to recognize speech in both their native (English) and weaker (Polish) language. In order to test this, two women were filmed reciting two cartoons, gesturing, and speaking in either English or Polish. The children's task was to respond in the language in which the story was presented to different questions prompted throughout the video. Each group scored and averaged these responses to see how much gesture improves language learning. Results indicated that when a gesture was present for students in the weaker language group (Polish), a more significant proportion of the story points were remembered (Figure 2). It also suggested that "children were significantly more likely to recall a story point in Polish if it was accompanied by matching gesture" (Wakefield 4.) These results show that when it came to language, including a matching gesture allowed the children to have a better memory and understanding of the story. Relating this to the bigger picture, it demonstrates that when people attempt to learn something unfamiliar, such as a new language, incorporating gestures as a "co-speech" tactic could improve memory and speed up the learning process for that concept.
Shifting gears to the article, Gesture Enhances Learning of a Complex Statistical Concept, Linda Rueckert et al. explore how gesture can improve the recognition of complex concepts. In this paper, the scientists wanted to observe whether adding gestures would improve the student's understanding of the explanation of ANOVA. ANOVA is a complex statistical concept that measures the variance between multiple data groups. In this experiment, the collegiate students were instructed to watch one of two videos: a professor explaining ANOVA with or without gestures. These students would take a pre- and post-test for the video, and the difference between those tests would tell the scientists whether the use of gestures improved the amount of learning for the students. The results of the experiment showed that students who were a part of the speech and gesture conditions had a significantly more significant change in score between the pre-and post-tests (M = 2.20, sd = 2.14) compared to the students in the speech alone condition (M = 0.86, sd = 2.51) (Rueckert et al. 3). These results stress gestures' importance in learning, especially for complex concepts. The discovery that gestures help in the learning and retention of concepts, such as ANOVA, may lead to future research examining which gestures can be most effective in helping retain information, performing experiments of different gestures, and comparing how successful they are at supporting students' cognitive functions when learning new topics.
Both these experiments have their respective similarities and differences. Both articles had the same goal of testing to see whether or not gestures can impact the memorization or learning of a new concept (language and ANOVA, respectively.) Each article's experimental setup was also quite similar, having the participants watch either of the two videos and test the information from one video. However, Dr. Wakefield and Zielinski's paper Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism demonstrated to readers that gestures can benefit the understanding and memorization of speech and language. At the same time, Dr. Rueckert and her colleagues' scientific article Gesture Enhances Learning of a Complex Statistical Concept, was more interested in the improvement gestures can provide in retaining new information, specifically about complex concepts. Overall, both articles highlight that using gestures is a great way for professors or educators to help students recognize the learning material they are being presented.
Works Cited
Rueckert, Linda, et al. “Gesture Enhances Learning of a Complex Statistical Concept - Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.” SpringerOpen, Springer International Publishing, 30 Jan. 2017, cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-016-0036-1#:~:text=This%20study%20adds%20to%20the%20existing%20literature%20on,a%20complex%20statistical%20concept%20%28analysis%20of%20variance%3B%20ANOVA%29.
Zielinski, Natalia, and Elizabeth M Wakefield. “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding through a Visual Attention Mechanism.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 19 July 2021, escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq.
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