Of all the things that you consider when preparing a lesson, how much thought do you give to what you will be doing with your hands? It’s unlikely that this will feature highly in your planning, but, according to research, perhaps it should.
A study undertaken last year by Celeste Pilegard, assistant teaching professor in the department of psychology at the University of California in San Diego, and Logan Fiorella, from the department of educational psychology at the University of Georgia, investigated whether the hand gestures teachers use has an impact on learning.
They directed a group of undergraduates to watch a video comparing Eastern and Western steamboats, and the instructor used hand gestures to explain the conceptual structure of the boats. In some lessons, the instructor used “structure gestures” - this involved moving their hands to the left or right - and in other lessons “surface gestures” - moving their hands closer together or further apart. In some lessons, both types of gesture were used and in other lessons, neither type was used.
A second experiment was carried out that replicated and extended the findings of the initial experiment, using a lesson comparing innate and acquired immunity.
The researchers found that in both experiments, the students who observed the instructor using structure gestures performed better than the other groups on an inference test, and in their paper ‘Using gestures to signal lesson structure and foster meaningful learning’, they concluded that structure gestures “help students mentally organise the content of a lesson according to its macrostructure”.
Does gesture really matter?
If you find it hard to believe that something as simple as moving your hands from left to right rather than closer together can make a real difference to learning, it’s worth pointing out that this latest research does not exist in isolation. The findings reinforce work undertaken by numerous other academics who have also explored the importance of gestures in learning.
One of these academics is Amelia Yeo, assistant professor in the psychology and child and human development department at the National Institute of Education in Singapore, who co-authored the papers ‘Students learn more when their teacher has learned to gesture effectively’ and ‘How teachers link ideas in mathematics instruction using speech and gesture’ looking into this subject.
Yeo says gestures enhance learning in several different ways.
“Hand gestures, such as pointing, can direct students’ attention to important diagrams or items in a lesson,” she explains. “Other types of hand gestures, such as those depicting shape or size, offer students a visual representation of what the teacher is referring to. Presenting students with information in more than one modality (ie, speech and gesture) can increase students’ retention of the lesson.”
Sharice Clough, a PhD candidate studying multimodal communication and cognition in the department of hearing and speech sciences at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, agrees that gestures are important in the classroom. She says there is “abundant evidence” that students comprehend and learn material better both when they observe their teacher gesturing and when they produce gestures themselves.
“In particular, there is a lot of research on the benefits of gesture for children in maths and word learning,” says Clough. “When speakers gesture, they are simulating rich perceptual and motor imagery in their minds. The gestures they produce provide unique insights into the speaker’s knowledge. For example, children often depict partial understanding in their gestures that they are not yet able to verbalise in speech. When teachers pay attention to a child’s gestures, they can better identify what a child knows and scaffold their instruction accordingly.”
Gesture types
Researchers have identified many different types or categories of gestures, but Clough highlights two that might be particularly helpful to teachers.
“The first are deictic gestures,” she says. “These are gestures that refer to the location of an object in space. This is most commonly done by pointing. When a teacher points, it can help direct student’s attention to the most important concepts and help them make connections between what the teacher says and the learning material.”
For instance, she continues, there are a number of examples of pointing gestures that can help students to learn math concepts, which are often abstract and symbolic.
“One example from the literature shows that students are better at learning the concept of mathematical equivalence (two sides of an equation being equal) when the teacher gestures to each side of the equation as they talk about them,” says Clough.
Yeo agrees that these “linking gestures” can be very helpful in the classroom.
“Linking gestures are basically pointing or tracing gestures that link two concepts, or representations, in a lesson,” she explains. “For example, during a math lesson on graph and equation, teachers can use pointing or tracing gestures to connect elements of the graph to elements in the equation. These linking gestures have been found to help students learn better, possibly by drawing students’ attention to the relationship between two representations.”
Another common type of gesture is “iconic” gestures. “These are gestures that depict physical properties of objects and actions,” says Clough. “For example, when talking about a ball, a speaker might gesture as if holding the ball in one hand, depict a throwing action, or trace the trajectory of a ball with their finger. Iconic gestures are meaningful and supplement speech by showing in addition to telling. In fact, these kinds of gestures often contain rich information beyond what is stated in the speaker’s words. When teachers gesture while speaking, they provide two ways or modalities for the listener to learn the information.”
Striking the balance
However, while there is an overwhelming amount of research that suggests hand gestures are generally beneficial for learning, it is not always best to rely on them too heavily, Yeo points out. During her studies, she has found that teachers should reconsider using gestures in situations where speech can more easily direct students’ attention.
“When teachers use gesture to refer to an equation on the board - eg, pointing to ‘2’ in the equation while saying ‘two’ - students actually learnt less than when the teacher did not gesture at all to the equation. In this case, the gesture could have distracted students,” says Yeo.
As a result, some teachers may need to consciously make an effort to rein in their gestures when explaining such concepts because, in the same way that babies naturally start to gesture when they learn language and typically produce their first gesture - usually a pointing gesture - between eight and 12 months of age, the research shows that teachers naturally produce gestures when they are instructing.
The good news is that teachers can be taught when and how to effectively use gestures, believes Martha Alibali, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has explored the benefits of gestures in a number of different studies. In one particular study, Alibali and her colleagues found that by simply viewing a tutorial on how to use linking gestures a teacher was able to significantly increase the number of linking gestures they used.
“People are often unaware of how they are using gestures and bringing attention to those gestures seems to be effective,” says Alibali. “We are studying whether teachers can easily learn to use gestures to link ideas. Teachers often do this spontaneously, but, with support, they may be able to do it more, or more effectively.”
Clough agrees that teachers can learn to gesture more effectively, and adds that, in doing so, they can also support children to do the same. “When teachers gesture, children are more likely to produce similar gestures themselves during learning, creating shared knowledge,” she says.
Does all of this mean that you should be carefully pre-planning the gestures you will use throughout each lesson, step-by-step? No. But it does mean that, from time to time, you might want to start gesturing with more intent.
So, the next time you point to the board or start waving your hands around to get your point across, remember that the gestures you’re making aren’t meaningless. On the contrary, they can have a real impact on a child’s ability to absorb what you are teaching them.
Simon Creasey is a freelance journalist
