Learning with Hand Gestures

         In October of 2025, Dr. Delmar gave the neuroscience three hundred class a lovely presentation on hand gestures and their vital role in learning. She spoke about how nonverbal communication plays a crucial role when teaching young children math. In one of the experiments, she spoke about in class, she gave us an example of how a math problem was shown to kids in two separate ways. One with gestures and the other without gestures, through this experiment, they were able to find how valuable it is to use hand gestures when instructing children. The experiment in the article "How our hands help us learn" by Dr. Goldin-Meadow and Dr. Wagner shows that children who produce gestures and mismatched speech are more ready to learn compared to those who do not. This study was conducted by having two children explain their perspective on the amount of water changing between two containers.

    A similar article to this idea is "Hand Gesture and Mathematics Learning: Lessons from an Avatar". In this experiment, Dr. Wagner and colleagues utilize a computer to teach children math. One group of students viewed lessons with an avatar gesturing, while the other group did not see the avatar gesturing. The findings of this study found that the children who viewed the avatar with the gesture learned more and were ready to transfer their knowledge (Wagner et al., 2017). In another article, "When our hands help us understand: A meta-analysis into the effects of gesture on comprehension". Dr. Dargue and colleagues search to find how beneficial gesturing is when it comes to comprehension (Drague et al., 2018). To do this, they used a sample size of eighty-three and measured their comprehension using gestures and speech. The findings of the study suggest that gestures play a key role when it comes to comprehension.

    All three studies talked about here show the same result that gestures are key when it comes to learning. I find this to be remarkably interesting as I never really considered how gestures have been affecting my way of learning. Despite being someone who is labeled as good with math, there have been some math classes I have struggled with, and I wonder now if that was because I did not understand what was being taught or if it was the teacher's style of teaching (no gesture use). As time goes on and society reaches an era of social media and the internet, making it hard to learn, it is important to keep studies like these in mind when working with children or anyone. I am curious to know if the way children learn math with gestures can be applied to other subjects in school as well. This kind of research can help improve not just the grades and learning of students, but also a student's self-confidence as failing grades tend to result in low self-confidence.

 

References

Cook, S. W., Friedman, H. S., Duggan, K. A., Cui, J., & Popescu, V. (2017). Hand

Gesture and Mathematics Learning: Lessons From an Avatar. Cognitive Science, 41(2), 518–535. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12344

Dargue N., Sweller N., & Jones P. M. (2019). When our hands help us understand: A

meta-analysis into the effects of gesture on comprehension. Psychological Bulletin, 145(8), 765-784.