Teaching concept-salient gestures to children leads to learning gains

Increasingly, research has demonstrated that gestures are a route into children’s unspoken thoughts. Encouraging children to gesture, therefore, may make their implicit understanding of a concept more explicit and bring about cognitive gains. This study tests the effects of encouraging children to incorporate specific gestures associated with a concept into their explanations. In a pre-test, intervention, post-test design 63 children experienced one of three interventions; a lesson without gestures, a lesson where they observed gestures or a lesson where they observed and also imitated gestures. The gestures used in the lessons mimicked those that children who have acquired the concept typically produce when explaining this task. Improvement was measured as change in performance on the task and increased explictness of understanding of the concept. Children who reproduced the concept-relevant gestures during the intervention improved significantly more than children who simply observed those gestures, who improved more than children whose training did not include gestures. These results show that gesture production, even when taught by another, can activate implicit knowledge and bring about learning