Research Shows Hand Movements Aid Learning Mathematics

Mad Professah was alerted to this interesting article about the impact that using hand gestures during the teaching of mathematics. Post-doctoral fellow Susan Wagner Cook at the University of Rochester has published an article in the latest issue of Cognition which indicates that students who use hand gestures while doing math are three times more likely to remember what they've learned.

"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, lead author and postdoctoral
fellow at the University. "We asked if the reverse could be true; if
actively employing gestures when learning helps retain new information."

It turned out to have a more dramatic effect than Cook expected. 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'd 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 will likely 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."