Gestures Convey Message: Learning in Progress

Rather, think about the way your arms flutter as you try to describe something almost ineffable. Or the way your hand wags up and down as you struggle for a word, as though you might physically retrieve it from some sticky mental crevasse.

These are the kinds of gestures that offer a window on the murky link between body and mind, and which in recent years have given rise to an International Society for Gesture Studies, a scientific journal (aptly named Gesture) and a newsletter called Manufacts.

"I've really been struck by how sophisticated and focused the field has become," said David McNeil, a professor emeritus of psychology and linguistics at the University of Chicago, the hotbed of gesture studies where Cook did her seminal work on the educational value of gestures. "It's really gaining momentum very rapidly."

The new focus on gestures comes at a time when researchers have been moving away from the old model of the brain as a sophisticated computer -- a model that came to prominence in the 1950s, when computers seemed to hold the answers to everything.

"People have started to realize there's something wrong with this model," said Arthur Glenberg, a gesture researcher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "We're not just dealing with zeros and ones. We're biological beings, and we ought to consider how we deal with the real world and take seriously the fact that we have bodies."

Neuroscientists have found, for example, that the part of the brain that controls hand movements is often active when people are doing math problems. "As though you're counting fingers," Glenberg said.

Similarly, parts of the brain responsible for speech are often active when people gesture -- more evidence of the link between language and movement, aside from formal sign language.

Observations such as these have led to a number of experiments to test the idea that gestures might help with memory and learning.

Glenberg has shown that when elementary and middle school students are asked to move objects about as they read a story -- placing a toy farmer on a toy tractor after reading a phrase about that activity, for example -- they scored better on tests about what happened in those stories.

Cook's latest work goes further, showing that even abstract gestures can enhance learning. In a classroom, she had some students mimic her sweeping hand motions to emphasize that both sides of an equation must be equal. Other students were simply told to repeat her words: "I want to make one side . . . equal to the other side."

A third group was told to mimic both her movements and words.

Weeks later, the students were quizzed. Those in the two groups that were taught the gestures were three times as likely to solve the equations correctly than were those who had learned only the verbal instructions, she and two colleagues reported in the July 25 issue of the journal Cognition.