The methods used by instructors to introduce new information is critical in students’ comprehension of the content in preparation for exams. Gestures are varied hand movements which can be used casually or for specific intended purposes. They can be deliberately applied in the learning process in order to place emphasis on certain concepts, which in turn, increases students’ understanding and retaining of the material.
This concept is the aim of the research experiment carried out by Brendan Bentley et al., titled “Using iconic hand gestures in teaching a year 8 science lesson.” In this article, Bentley et al. investigate the effect of teachers using deliberately planned iconic gestures versus traditional teaching methods and habitual, deictic gestures in their lesson plans for 8th-grade students.
Results of this study found that students in the group that was exposed to deliberate iconic gestures showed better comprehension and a reduced cognitive load, while the students exposed to conventional deictic gestures did not receive benefits of that extent, showing consistency with the experiment’s hypothesis. This suggests that by pairing new information with iconic gestures, cognitive load is reduced, students’ working memory is enhanced, and a better foundation is developed for long-term memory and future recall.
A similar study led by Dr. Natalia Zielinksi and Dr. Elizabeth Wakefield, titled “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism” investigates the impact of co-speech gesture on children’s comprehension of narratives delivered in both their stronger and weaker languages, observing how language proficiency affects visual attention to gesture. Participants consisted of Polish-English bilingual children tasked with watching recorded segments of stories in each language and responding by recalling as many story points as they could. Story points were accompanied by either matching gestures, which were congruent to speech, or mismatching gestures, which were incongruent to speech.
Their results found that matching gestures were beneficial for children when recalling information from narratives delivered in Polish, their weaker language. Visual attention to gesture was greater when the children found the spoken narrative in their weaker language to be more complex. The gestures served to clarify speech when the spoken speech was more difficult to understand, resulting in better comprehension and greater recall of the story points.
In both research articles, the use of gestures congruent to spoken speech were shown to aid comprehension of new or complex information. Gesture was also observed to play a role in working memory when participants were tasked with recalling the material. Future research on the effectiveness of gestures may be beneficial to the current education system; students would greatly benefit from lesson plans that incorporate congruent, deliberate gestures into the content. Taking into consideration the results of both studies, increased use of congruent gestures would allow for better understanding of the material and a stronger foundation in students’ educational careers.
References:
Bentley B., Walters K. & Yates G.C.R. (2022). Using iconic hand gestures in teaching a year 8 science lesson. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4052.
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. (n.d.). Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq#main.
No comments:
Post a Comment