Abstract
In general, we know that gesture accompanying spoken instruction can help children learn. The present study was conducted to better understand how gesture can support children’s comprehension of spoken instruction and whether the benefit of teaching though speech and gesture over spoken instruction alone depends on differences in cognitive profile – prior knowledge children have that is related to a to-be-learned concept. To answer this question, we explored the impact of gesture instruction on children’s analogical reasoning ability. Children between the ages of 4 and 11 years solved scene analogy problems before and after speech alone or speech and gesture instruction while their visual attention was monitored. Our behavioral results suggest a marginal benefit of gesture instruction over speech alone, but only 5-year-old children showed a distinct advantage from speech + gesture instruction when solving the post-instruction trial, suggesting that at this age, children have the cognitive profile in place to utilize the added support of gesture. Furthermore, while speech + gesture instruction facilitated effective visual attention during instruction, directing attention away from featural matches and toward relational information was pivotal for younger children’s success post instruction. We consider how these results contribute to the gesture-for-learning literature and consider how the nuanced impact of gesture is informative for educators teaching tasks of analogy in the classroom.
Highlights
Gestures – movements of the hands that are naturally used in conversation and express ideas through their form and movement trajectory – help children learn
We reasoned that previous work has shown that as children’s inhibitory control and working memory improve, they are more likely to succeed on analogical reasoning problems (e.g., Doumas et al, 2018; Simms et al, 2018), and that children with lower inhibitory control look more to the featural match when solving scene analogy problems (Guarino et al, under revision), finding that age was predictive of these measures would suggest that age can serve as a proxy for cognitive profile
The goals of the present study were to explore whether the impact of adding gesture to spoken instruction on analogical reasoning depends on children’s cognitive profile, and to use eye tracking to further understand how gesture might facilitate learning by disambiguating spoken instruction
Summary
Gestures – movements of the hands that are naturally used in conversation and express ideas through their form and movement trajectory – help children learn. This has been found across domains, including mathematics (Singer and Goldin-Meadow, 2005; Cook et al, 2013), symmetry (Valenzeno et al, 2003), conservation (Church et al, 2004; Ping and Goldin-Meadow, 2008), and word learning (Wakefield et al, 2018a). Children’s ability to follow along with spoken instruction when it was accompanied by gesture predicted their ability to correctly solve mathematical equivalence problems beyond instruction (Wakefield et al, 2018b)
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