The idea that “gestures improve learning” has be increasingly popular in recent years. I first heard about this idea from Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow at a Learning and the Brain conference back in 2015, and the claim has gotten more emphatic with every passing year.
This emphasis on gesture — within the broader field of “embodied cognition” — is approaching certainty in the field.
As is so often the case, I myself am less confident than others about many of these claims.
In this post, I want to
- Explain my concerns about the “gestures promote learning” claims
- Explore a recent study that pushes back against my concerns, and
- Highlight the features of that study that support my concerns.
In other words: we’re taking baby steps here. This study that I’ll explain does offer modest support to this claim — and offers some useful specifics.
But it certainly does not make the “gestures promote learning” a slam dunk. And it flatly contradicts some of the most vehement statements you’ll hear when people champion embodied cognition and gestures.
Initial Concerns
I am certainly open to the idea that gestures might promote learning. No, honestly: it could be true!
At the same time, I want to
- understand the SPECIFICS of that claim, and
- have confidence in the research that supports them.
These requests feel reasonable to me.
So, specifically:
Who is making the gesture? The teacher? The learner? Both? A video?
Does some kind of learning get more benefit from gestures than others?
For example, I know how I could use a gesture to reinforce the word “hatchet.” (A hatchet gesture is easy to envisage.)
But: how would I make a gesture to help students learn “protagonist” and “antagonist”? Or, “pleistocene”? Or “tradition”?
What if students learn the same gesture in two different classes? Say: the “hatchet” gesture means “hatchet” in my Spanish class but “guillotine” in my history class.
Do gestures help students of all ages? Are there cultural differences?
In other words: what are the rules to govern the creation and use of gestures? And: what research supports each specific component?
Last year, I wrote about a study that starts answering some of these questions. But: we’ve got a long way to go.
Frankly, the questions listed above fit quite nicely under the heading of “boundary conditions”: we need to know the “boundaries” within which teaching suggestions work, and outside of which they don’t. I don’t quite understand why people look vexed when I ask such questions.
A Recent Study Strengthens the Case
Because I have outlier views on this topic, I’m always on the lookout for research that will change my mind.
Recently, I came across a study from 2021 that offers lots of helpful information.
This study does, in fact, give me some increased confidence in the ideas that gestures can help. And, it offers helpful specifics about ways that gestures MIGHT NOT help. That is: it clarifies those boundary conditions.
This research has LOTS of moving parts, so I’ll try to summarize it accurately and briskly.
Twenty-two German adults spent 4 days studying foreign language vocabulary.
Specifically, they learned 90 word pairs: a word in German, and its “translation” in a made-up language called “Vimmi.” (Researchers used made-up words so that the participants’ prior knowledge wouldn’t muddle their results.)
45 of those word pairs were accompanied by a gesture. (The participants saw someone making the gesture; and they also made the gesture themselves.)
The other 45 pairs were accompanied by a drawing of the word; in other words, not a gesture.
This group of non-gesture word pairs gives the researchers a useful comparison point. They can ask not just “did gestures helps participants learn?,” but “did the gestures help compared to the pictures?”
Now things get REALLY interesting.
Researchers then used a fancy gizmo to DISRUPT NEURAL PROCESSING in a part of the brain that coordinates gestures.
Specifically, several days after participants learned the word-pairs, researchers asked participants to recall them out loud. While participants did so, researchers used the (perfectly safe) neuro-scrambler for half of the words; they then faked the neuro-scrambling for the other half of the words. The participants, in other words, didn’t know when the scrambler was on or off.
Let’s add two more cool variables — variables that help answer my pesky questions:
Researchers tested participants five days and five months later. So: they could see how long these effects lasted.
And, they also tested two kinds of words: concrete nouns (“window”) and abstract nouns (“benefaction”).
Based on all these moving pieces, you can see that this study might finally convince me that gestures help — or give us some ideas about boundary conditions.
Yup: (Some) Gestures Help (Some) Learning (Somewhat)
When researchers tested the participants five days later, they found that seeing and producing gestures helped participants learn concrete nouns.
Specifically, the neuro-scrambler (presumably) reduced the neural encoding of the gestures for half of the words. And participants took longer to remember those words than the un-scrambled ones.
The likeliest interpretation: part of the memory of the word pair had been encoded in the motor cortex. When we interfere with that part of the memory, we interfere with the memory overall.
So, even though I’m naturally cautious about such things, I’m comfortable saying:
“This research supports the idea that seeing and making gestures about concrete objects helps learn those words in the short term.”
Baby steps.
Yup: Important Limits Exist
At the same time, you’ve probably noticed the boundary conditions in that statement.
- The gestures did help participants remember concrete nouns (“window,” “hatchet”); at the same time, participants did not remember abstract nouns (“benefaction”, “protagonist/antagonist”) as smoothy over time. (I should be clear: this statement summarizes a very complex set of findings; others might look at the findings and disagree with that statement.)
- The gestures did help after 5 days, but not after five months. So: short-term memory got a boost. But long-term memory — not so much.
I should also say that this study design (like ALL study designs) includes some features that require our caution.
- 22 is not a huge number of participants. I wouldn’t often make big decisions based on such a small group. (Of course, as more and more small studies agree, they might add up to compelling recommendations.)
Also, this study pushes back against one of the more common statements within the broader field of “embodied cognition,” and also in the narrower field of “gestures promote learning.”
“Learning doesn’t just happen in the brain; it happens in the body.“
Now, I spend LOTS of time on this blog warning readers against over-reliance on neuroscience. We spend far too much time saying “ooh, look, BRAIN.” (I think we should focus much more on psychology: the study of the mind.)
This study, however, requires that we take the brain itself seriously. Those brain scramblers, after all, scrambled signals in the motor cortex: a part of the brain. They did not do anything to the arm or the rest of the body.
We can, I think, reasonably say that the learning happened WITH the body. But it didn’t happen IN the body; more precisely, it happened IN the part of the body called “the brain.” The arm didn’t change and learn. The brain changed. The mind learned.
TL; DR
This small study adds to a growing body of research that suggests seeing and making the right kind of gesture can help people learn some things, at least for a few days.
It does not reach grander conclusions than those.
And, it strongly contradicts the idea that “learning happens in the body.” Bodily movements can help help the brain change; but the brain itself changes, and the mind itself learns.
A Final Note
This study includes substantially more complicated procedures and calculations than I typically try to summarize on the blog. As a result, reasonable readers might believe I have over-simplified the study and its conclusions; you might even think I have MIS-summarized both.
I have, quite genuinely, tried to do justice to the study and its conclusions. And, I include this link so you can check for yourself.
Mathias, B., Waibel, A., Hartwigsen, G., Sureth, L., Macedonia, M., Mayer, K. M., & von Kriegstein, K. (2021). Motor cortex causally contributes to vocabulary translation following sensorimotor-enriched training. Journal of Neuroscience, 41(41), 8618-8631.
