Research Shows Hand Movements Aid Learning Mathematics

Published: July 25, 2007, 3:33 pm

Tags: education, research, mathematics, science

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 aconversation even when we're not entirely clear how that information relatesto what we're saying," says Susan Wagner Cook, lead author and postdoctoralfellow at the University. "We asked if the reverse could be true; ifactively employing gestures when learning helps retain new information."It turned out to have a more dramatic effect than Cook expected. In herstudy, 90 percent of students who had learned algebraic concepts using gesturesremembered them three weeks later. Only 33 percent of speech-only students whohad learned the

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