Gesturing is something that the vast majority of human beings happen to do and don’t necessarily think about. Non-verbal communication is also believed to make up the majority of communication. The ability to communicate ideas in a classroom setting is imperative. Two studies here give us insight as to how gesturing can be applied to a classroom setting and what this tells us about learning.
The paper Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism extensively describes the research that investigated the utility of co-speech gestures in regard to language comprehension. The finding of this study showed that bilingual people pay more attention to gestures when interacting in a language they are weaker in. Yet, this example frames attention to gesturing as a downstream effect of poor language comprehension. According to a recent article from the Scientific American Journal, however, new research is coming out from that describes how “Students Who Gesture during Learning ‘Grasp’ Concepts Better.” The article mainly describes a study that was carried out by researchers at UCLA and California State University. The title of the paper is Instructed Hand Movements Affect Students’ Learning of an Abstract Concept From Video and the leading author of the paper, Yunyi Zhang, describes how the main purpose of the study was to recognize exactly how powerful gesturing can be. The study’s setup involved 2 experiments with a different number of subjects participating in each. The first had a total of 60 undergraduate students and the second had a total of 130 undergraduate students, respectively. In the first experiment, students had to watch a narrated video explaining the idea of a certain statistical model. The 60 students were divided into 3 groups. The groups included a control that simply watched the video, and a “match” group that watched the video overlaid with animation and was instructed to imitate the movement of the red bars in the animation with their hands. In addition, there was a “mismatch” group that watched the video overlaid with animation but was instructed to imitate the movement of the red bars in a way that didn’t resemble their movement in the video. The 3 groups watched the video for their specific group 3 times. At the end, all 60 student participants took a quiz, and it was found that the “match” group outperformed the other two groups by a significant margin. The second experiment involved the same exact experimental setup with a larger number of participants, and it yielded very similar results as the “match” group outperformed the other two by a significant margin. Equally as important, it was found that a condition that included a gesturing factor, regardless of whether it was the “match” or “mismatch” group, kept the student participants more engaged. This was tested for based on how the students’ rating of how well they understood the video.
Both studies shed light on gesturing, but in the study Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism, the effect of gesturing was examined on subjects that were simply asked to take a rather passive role – being asked on what they remember from aspects of a specific storyline. In the study, Instructed Hand Movements Affect Students’ Learning of an Abstract Concept From Video, the student participants were actually instructed to gesture themselves, taking on a more active role. As previously mentioned, students that gestured did, in fact, have better scores. The study, however, did not examine the effect of gesturing on students that simply passively watched the animated video, wheras the study Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism specifically focused on that effect. The implications that are drawn from both of these studies calls for a deeper understanding of what goes into the consolidation of information and learning. Recently, there has been more research and talk on what goes into effective studying, and the term “active learning” is definitely one that has been trending over the past few years. People are starting to realize that by applying information that you happen to learn and engaging in higher-order thinking, you get better results while spending less time. This was definitely reflected in Zhang’s study, where students were called to physically gesture and accurately represent the movement of the red bars in the animation – representative of when the narrator in the study mentioned that one data set had more variation than the other. The findings of studies like these should be shared with educators around the globe, as it allows them a deeper understanding of how to bring about the best results in the classroom.
References:
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021, July 19). 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.
Hutson, M. (2021a, April 13). Students who gesture during learning “grasp” concepts better. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/students-who-gesture-during-learning-grasp-concepts-better/
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