Learning can be a challenging endeavor. It can be confusing, and the learning process may be long and complicated. As children continue through their education experience, it is hard to ensure that every child is gaining the proper skill set and understanding the provided material well enough to be successful in the class. Students deserve an equal opportunity to learn, which may be difficult to provide considering that many children have disabilities that may impede their learning, especially in complex subjects such as math. With this in mind, researchers Jennifer B. Walsh and Casey Hord from the University of Cincinnati performed a qualitative experiment: "Using Gestures and Diagrams to Support Students With Learning Disabilities Enrolled in Algebra II." In this article, Walsh and Hord explore the use of gestures and diagrams as a tool to possibly enhance the learning experiences of young students with learning disabilities (LD) in secondary-level mathematics.
Children with learning disabilities are students who struggle with academics but score higher on intelligence tests than students who are considered to have intellectual disabilities. These students may struggle in school but still exhibit a capacity to learn. Just as regular education students need to pass mathematics to graduate, students with learning disabilities are held to the same standard in the United States, even though the task may be difficult. Many students with LD struggle with working memory, which can cause difficulties in solving multi-step math problems that frequently appear in algebra. General education classes can create high-stakes environments involving challenging curricula and stressful high-stakes testing. These factors create a significant need to create tools that will aid learning processes for children with LD.
To study how gestures and diagrams affect the learning process of children with learning disabilities, the study used six one-on-one teaching sessions with two students with known learning disabilities. The sessions involved many math topics, including logarithms, reciprocals, inverse operations, and reciprocals. The data is collected through observations, student work samples, and field notes. When studying the use of gestures as a learning tool for students with LD, researchers have noted that they can be helpful in mathematical settings for students with disabilities. Using gestures can limit the use of highly complicated mathematical terms that make math seem incomprehensible for students with learning disabilities. The use of gestures can also help with the facilitation of concluding step-based algebra problems. In summary, teachers can use gestures to aid in the learning process and create more inclusivity in the classroom because all the students are given extra resources that help them comprehend the material.
Also considering the effects of gestures, the article "Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Mechanism" by Dr. Zielinski and Dr. Wakefield considers how gesture benefits language comprehension in children that have strong or weak proficiency in a language and how the language competency affects attention to gesture. The study tested a group of bilingual Polish-English speakers to see if reinforcing gestures improved speech comprehension when the message was complex. The results of this study show that gestures are very beneficial for language comprehension in children with less developed language skills.
Integrating these two articles, both studies show that gestures can benefit children's cognitive processing. Gestures are beneficial when paired with algebra instruction to help students with learning disabilities understand and solve complex problems. Gestures also aid in language comprehension when paired with speech. These two research studies shed significant light on the dynamics of gestures and cognitive processing, opening the door for gestures to play a pivotal role in processing and utilizing information in many categories.
References:
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. (n.d.). Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism.
Walsh, J., & Hord, C. Gestures and Diagrams to Support Students With Learning Disabilities Enrolled in Algebra II.
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