Gestures can help children learn math better

Washington: Children who use their hands to gesture during a math lesson gain a deep understanding of the problems they are taught, according to a new research. Previous research has found that gestures can help children learn.

So researchers from the University of Chicago's Department of Psychology designed the study in particular to answer whether abstract gesture can support generalisation beyond a particular problem and whether abstract gesture is a more effective teaching tool than concrete action.

"We found that acting gave children a relatively shallow understanding of a novel math concept, whereas gesturing led to deeper and more flexible learning," said the study's lead author, Miriam A Novack, a PhD student in psychology.

The researchers taught third-grade children a strategy for solving one type of mathematical equivalence problem.

They then tested the students on similar mathematical equivalence problems to determine how well they understood the underlying principle.

The researchers randomly assigned 90 children to conditions in which they learned using different kinds of physical interaction with the material.

In one group, children picked up magnetic number tiles and put them in the proper place in the formula.

Another group mimed that action without actually touching the tiles, and a third group was taught to use abstract gestures with their hands to solve the equations.

In the abstract gesture group, children were taught to produce a V-point gesture with their fingers under two of the numbers, metaphorically grouping them, followed by pointing a finger at the blank in the equation.

The children were tested before and after solving each problem in the lesson, including problems that required children to generalise beyond what they had learned in grouping the numbers.

For example, they were given problems that were similar to the original one, but had different numbers on both sides of the equation.

Children in all three groups learned the problems they had been taught during the lesson. But only children who gestured during the lesson were successful on the generalisation problems.

"Abstract gesture was most effective in encouraging learners to generalise the knowledge they had gained during instruction, action least effective, and concrete gesture somewhere in between," said senior author Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology.

"Our findings provide the first evidence that gesture not only supports learning a task at hand but, more importantly, leads to generalisation beyond the task. Children appear to learn underlying principles from their actions only insofar as those actions can be interpreted symbolically," she said.