Cognition
Important Gestures in Learning
Children who ‘talk with their hands’ do
better at math, a new Rochester study finds. By Jonathan Sherwood
’04 (MA)
Suppose your math teacher writes the following problem
on the board: “9 + 3 + 6 = __ + 6.” How would you
approach it?
If you’re like most third-graders, your first
response would probably be to think the equal sign indicates that
the first three numbers should be totaled up and the answer put
into the blank.
HANDY ANSWERS: In her study of
third- and fourth-graders, Susan Wagner Cook found that gesturing
helped children remember important mathematical concepts.
But an interesting little light bulb goes off when the
same kids are asked to explain how they got their answer, according
to a new Rochester-led study. As the children walk through the
problem, pointing along the way, they discover that the equal sign
is doing something different in the problem.
“We’ve known for a while that we use
gestures to add information to a conversation even when we’re
not entirely clear how that information relates to what we’re
saying,” says Susan Wagner Cook, a postdoctoral fellow at the
University. “We asked if the reverse could be true; if
actively employing gestures when learning helps retain new
information.”
In a study published this summer in the journal
Cognition, lead author Cook suggests that it’s
possible to help children learn difficult concepts by providing
gestures as an additional and potent avenue for taking in
information. In the study of 84 third- and fourth-graders, kids who
were asked to physically gesture at math problems were nearly three
times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they’ve
learned.
“My intuition is that gestures enhance learning
because they capitalize on our experience acting in the
world,” says Cook. “We have a lot of experience
learning through interacting with our environment as we grow, and
my guess is that gesturing taps into that need to
experience.”
In her study, 90 percent of students who had learned
algebraic concepts using gestures remembered them three weeks
later. Only 33 percent of speech-only students who had learned the
concept during instruction later retained the lesson. And perhaps
most astonishing of all, 90 percent of students who had learned by
gesture alone—no speech at all—recalled what they had
been taught.
Cook used a variation on a classic gesturing
experiment. When third-graders approach a two-sided algebra
equation, such as “9 + 3 + 6 = __ + 6” on a blackboard,
they usually try to solve it in the simple way they have always
approached math problems.
They tend to think in terms of “the equal sign
means put the answer here,” rather than thinking that the
equal sign divides the problem into two halves. As a result,
children often completely ignore the final “+ 6.”
However, even when children discard that final integer,
they will often point to it momentarily as they explain how they
attacked the problem. Those children who gestured to the number,
even though they may seem to ignore it, are demonstrating that they
have a piece of information they can’t reconcile. Previous
work has shown that the children with that extra bit of
disconnected knowledge are the ones ready to learn, which suggests
that perhaps giving children extra information in their gesture
could lead to their learning.
Cook divided 84 third- and fourth-graders into three
groups. One group expressed the concept verbally without being
allowed to use gestures. The second group was allowed to use only
gestures and no speech, and the third group employed both. Teachers
gave all the children the same instruction, which used both speech
and gesture.
After three weeks, the children were given regular
in-school math tests. Of those children who had learned to solve
the problem correctly, only a third of the speech-only students
remembered the principles involved, but that figure rose
dramatically for the speech-and-gesture, and the gesture-only
group, to 90 percent retention.
Cook plans to look into how gesturing could be
implemented effectively in classrooms to make a noticeable
improvement in children’s learning.
“Gesturing does have one clear benefit,”
Cook adds. “It’s free.”
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