EduTip 28: Add gestures to strengthen learning.

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Watch a video version of this tip on Instagram.

There’s a lot of research showing that adding gestures to instruction improves the quality of our learning. And the cool thing is, including almost any kind of gestures makes a bigger positive difference than no gestures at all. Here are just a few key points from the research:

1. When we produce gestures along with speech, we tend to recall that information better (Cook et al., 2010)
2. When teachers use their hands while explaining topics, students understand more and remember more of the content. (Hostetter, 2011). So if you tend to talk with your hands, that’s a good thing for your students’ learning.
3. Gestures have been found to improve comprehension in all ages, including adults (Dargue et al., 2019), contrary to earlier research that suggested it benefitted younger children significantly more than older children or adults.

Now even though the research shows that any gestures have some positive impact, certain types of gestures tend to make an even bigger difference. So let’s look at the four types of gestures, identified by people who study nonverbal communication:

• iconic gestures represent the physical thing itself, like making the shape of a circle to represent a circle
• metaphoric gestures represent an abstract idea with a physical gesture, like making a fist to represent the idea of strength
• deictic gestures are made when we point at or gesture toward the thing we’re talking about, so the gesture itself doesn’t have any inherent meaning
• beat gestures are movements we make to emphasize our speech, like making little karate chops in the air as we say important words; these also have no inherent meaning

Although all four types of gestures can improve learning, iconic and metaphoric gestures — which have a semantic relationship to the concepts they’re describing — have a stronger impact than deictic or beat gestures (Dargue et al., 2019, Ma & Jin, 2022). So when you’re planning instruction, think about ways you can add more of these meaningful gestures when you present information AND have students do them as well.

Here’s an example of how I’m using this principle in my own learning. I recently took a part-time job as a server in a Japanese restaurant, and a few menu items are still giving me trouble. I need to learn these words so I can find them faster when people order them and I have to put them into the computer: una, the word for eel, ika, the word for squid, and geso, which means squid tentacles. So I am making up three iconic gestures for these based on eel and squid YouTube videos I watched (you can see these in my Instagram video for this edutip) and am going to repeat them over and over again until I remember what these words mean. 

You can do the same thing with your students: Make up gestures (or have them help you create some) to represent key terms in your curriculum, especially those that are harder to remember, and add these gestures into your class time — maybe just have students do them with you anytime you do them, or set aside a minute every day where you say a word and students have to do the gesture, just to reinforce the connection between the physical action and the idea.

References

Cook, S. W., Yip, T. K., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2010). Gesturing makes memories that last. Journal of Memory and Language, 63(4), 465–475. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2010.07.002

Dargue, N., Sweller, N., & Jones, M. P. (2019). When our hands help us understand: A meta-analysis into the effects of gesture on comprehension. Psychological Bulletin, 145(8), 765–784. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000202

Hostetter, A. B. (2011). When do gestures communicate? A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 137(2), 297–315. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022128

Ma, S., & Jin, G. (2022). The relationship between different types of co-speech gestures and L2 speech performance. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.941114

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