ABSTRACT
Gestures are movements of the hands that we naturally use when we speak, and they can express information through their form and movement trajectory. Over the past three decades, researchers have shown that gestures benefit learning – when gesture is incorporated into instruction, children and adults show flexible, long-lasting understanding across many domains, including mathematical equivalence, Piagetian conservation, mental rotation, and vocabulary learning. But why does gesture help learning? To answer this question, researchers have often focused on the ability of gesture to integrate with our language system, and indeed, this aspect of gesture does play an important role. However, gesture is also a form of movement. As embodied cognition has become a more prominent framework in the field at large, researchers have considered how gesture’s identity as a type of action plays into its effects on learning. In this chapter, we first (1) define what gesture is (and what it is not) and then (2) provide evidence that gesture enhances learning in a variety of domains. We next (3) introduce the Gesture-as-Simulated-Action framework, which hypothesizes that gestures grow out of action and, in this sense, are embodied. As evidence for this point of view, we (4) show that gesture facilitates learning by involving the motor system in the process, whether gestures are produced by the learner or by the teacher. We end by (5) discussing how gesture can be harnessed in teaching and learning.
