Instructed Hand Movements Affect Students’ Learning of an Abstract Concept From Video

Abstract

Producing content‐related gestures has been found to impact students’ learning, whether such gestures are spontaneously generated by the learner in the course of problem‐solving, or participants are instructed to pose based on experimenter instructions during problem‐solving and word learning. Few studies, however, have investigated the effect of (a) performing instructed gestures while learning concepts or (b) producing gestures without there being an implied connection between the gestures and the concepts being learned. The two studies reported here investigate the impact of instructed hand movements on students’ subsequent understanding of a concept. Students were asked to watch an instructional video—focused on the concept of statistical model—three times. Two experimental groups were given a secondary task to perform while watching the video, which involved moving their hands to mimic the placement and orientation of red rectangular bars overlaid on the video. Students were told that the focus of the study was multitasking, and that the instructed hand movements were unrelated to the material being learned. In the content‐match group the placement of the hands reinforced the concept being explained, and in the content‐mismatch group it did not. A control group was not asked to perform a secondary task. In both studies, findings indicate that students in the content‐match group performed better on the posttest, and showed less variation in performance, than did students in the content‐mismatch group, with control students falling in between. Instructed hand movement—even when presented as an unrelated, secondary task—can affect students’ learning of a complex concept.

Finger pointing to self‐manage cognitive load in learning from split‐attention examples

“…However, in the guided self-management phase the instructions were specific in how learners had to point and this may not have been the way learners are used to apply pointing during learning. Research has suggested that if the instructor-guided hand movements do not match the learning content or learners' habitual way of using the hands, it can even hamper learning (Zhang et al, 2021). This explanation may also apply to the fact that we did not find the hypothesized superiority of two-handed pointing over one-handed pointing (Hypothesis 3, 5), suggesting that the instructions for one-handed pointing and two-handed pointing might have been ineffective because they were not aligned with participants' preferential use of the hands.…”

Research Avenues Supporting Embodied Cognition in Learning and Instruction

“…In addition to whole body actions, the relevance feature can also affect hand motions, such as gesturing. For example, in two experiments with a total of 190 undergraduates, Zhang et al (2021) compared three groups learning about statistics (e.g., probability distributions) through videos: (a) making relevant gesturing movements, (b) making irrelevant gesturing movements, and (c) not making gestures (control). Results showed significantly higher performance when students made relevant gestures (e.g., moving the hands horizontally to learn about the distribution), compared to both irrelevant gesturing (e.g., moving the hands vertically) or no gesturing.…”

The Effect of Cognitive Relevance of Directed Actions on Mathematical Reasoning

“…Directed actions also have been used to influence people's statistical reasoning. Zhang, Givvin, Sipple, Son, and Stigler (2021) asked participants to perform a secondary task by moving their hands to track placement and orientation of rectangles that were overlaid atop an instructional video teaching the concept of using equations as a statistically predictive model. Those performing hand movements designed to be conceptually relevant to the mathematics outperformed those whose movements were conceptually irrelevant, as well as those who did no directed actions.…”