Gestures in Learning & Teaching

Gestures are a readily available, but often overlooked, resource that can serve as a powerful tool for communicating and meaning making. Gestures are hand and body movements that refer to locations, actions, or objects (Church et al., 2016), and they are a resource that both students and teachers can use in classrooms. Gestures function as an extension of the cognitive system, serving both to express and construct meaning from and in the world. Researchers in fields ranging from linguistics and cognitive science to education and developmental psychology have contributed to theories of gesture, embodiment, and multimodal learning for several decades (e.g., Arzarello et al., 2009; Crowder, 1996; Goldin-Meadow, 2011; Hostetter & Alibali, 2008; Kendon, 1997; Roth, 2001).

Teachers regularly produce gestures during classroom instruction (e.g., Flevares & Perry, 2001; Roth, 2001; Shein, 2012; Wilson et al., 2014), and these gestures take many different forms and have many different functions. Teachers use pointing gestures to guide students’ attention, they use representational gestures to depict objects, ideas, and relationships, and they use beat gestures to express emphasis and mark discourse structure. Teachers also use sets of gestures to connect ideas, for example, by indicating corresponding elements of related representations (such as an equation and a graph) (Alibali et al., 2014; Richland, 2015). Growing evidence indicates that teachers’ gestures matter for students’ learning (e.g., Alibali et al., 2013; Carlson et al., 2014).

Students also regularly produce gestures when they are solving problems (Crowder, 1996; Pier et al., 2019) or explaining their reasoning (Goldin-Meadow, 2011). These gestures can indicate how students think about and represent novel and abstract ideas (e.g., Núñez, 2008). Usually, these spontaneous gestures align with—or match—what students are saying (Goldin-Meadow, 2011). But at other, more critical times, spontaneous gestures can convey aspects of students’ thinking and reasoning that differ from or go beyond what students say (Goldin-Meadow, Alibali, Church, 1993; Singer et al., 2008). When students express different information in gesture and speech, they may be in the process of learning something new; at these pivotal moments, students tend to be highly receptive to instruction (Perry et al., 1988). In addition to studying students’ spontaneous gestures, researchers also have explored the effects of eliciting gestures during instructional activities. For example, simply telling students to gesture while solving problems (Broaders et al., 2007) or explaining scientific phenomena (Lindgren et al., 2016) has been shown to promote learning. Furthermore, asking students to produce specific gestures also leads to positive outcomes in STEM contexts (Cook et al., 2008; Goldin-Meadow et al., 2009; Mathayas et al., 2019).

Digital tools can enable new ways of examining and augmenting gestures (Chang et al., 2013). In the absence of technology, gestures are largely ephemeral, but with video and other motion-capture technologies, gestures can be recorded, reflected on, and potentially repurposed or transformed. A simple, but potentially powerful effect of these technologies is making teachers and learners more aware of the gestures they are making (e.g., Mathayas et al., 2019). Emerging technologies, from touchscreens to motion sensors, make it possible to use gestures to interact with learning content, such as a digital visualization that shows the effect of molecular interactions based on how a learner is modeling them with their hands (Wallon & Lindgren, 2017). AI and machine learning algorithms make it possible to make inferences about teacher and learner gestures (e.g., Blikstein & Worsley, 2016), which opens many possibilities for intervention.