Have you ever completed a task but later you were unable to articulate what you did in order to succeed? For example, after I have completed a complicated math problem, I am typically unable to explain in words how I arrived at my answer. \u00a0When this occurs, we are said to have implicit knowledge of the task rather than explicit knowledge of the task. In other words, the knowledge that is evident in our behavior but it is unavailable through speech. \u00a0When I am unable to explain or articulate something, I often find myself gesturing or using my hands. In fact, I think of myself as a frequent gesturer. Many\u00a0learners, myself included, demonstrate spontaneous gestures when trying to describe a task or knowledge that they cannot quite articulate. These gestures that we use while speaking are a way of revealing our implicit knowledge. Because gesturing behavior helps us reveal knowledge we cannot articulate, could gesturing enhance our learning? New research on gesturing has shown that gesturing can give us insight to the information that we cannot express through speech. But what happens when we are forced to gesture? Can forced gesturing reveal our implicit knowledge or perhaps, prepare us for learning?<\/p>\n
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A study by Broaders, Cook, Mitchell, and Goldin-Meadow in 2007 addressed the concept of forced gesturing by making elementary school children gesture while explaining their answers to math problems that they had never learned before. \u00a0In the first experiment of the study, the researchers\u2019 goal was to simply determine whether forcing the participants to gesture would help them express any implicit knowledge. This was accomplished by asking children to complete two sets of six mathematical equivalence problems (for example: 6 + 3 + 7 = ___ + 7). In the first set, experimenters gave the children no instruction about gesturing (this was used as a baseline) and in the second set, some children were instructed to move their hands while describing how they solved a problem, some children were instructed not to move their hands, and others were given no instructions once again. Overall, researchers found\u00a0that forcing children to use hand gestures when describing how they solved math problems helped them express, in gesture, many correct strategies that were previously unexpressed. By being told to gesture, children were able to generate the correct strategies to solve the math problems all by themselves.<\/p>\n
The second experiment of the study digs a little deeper. \u00a0In the second part of the experiment, researchers investigated if forced gesturing could also increase the likelihood of a child benefiting from teacher instruction. In order to test this, the same variables and control \u00a0were used as in the first experiment with an additional couple of factors. In addition to the baseline and original manipulation, the children were given a lesson of how to solve the new type of math problem (the children do nothing but watch and listen during this step) and then finally, the children were given a test which simply involved the children solving 6 more of the same type of math problems. The second portion of this study proved to have some additional interesting results! Researchers found that although children in both condition groups were instructed to place some attention to the children\u2019s hands when they described their problem solving (either to move them or keep them still), only the children who were told to make gestures or move their hands added new strategies to their list of problem solving techniques and actually profited from the math lesson.<\/p>\n
Broaders et al. show in this study that not only can the encouragement of gesturing help express our implicit knowledge, but also it helps us become more prepared for learning and it increases our receptibility of instruction. So, what\u2019s the bid deal? Gesturing could start to play a bigger role in the classroom. Telling a student to gesture brings out, in gesture, the knowledge that the student does not yet know how to verbalize or articulate. Although this study does not claim that being told to gesture\u00a0creates<\/i>\u00a0implicit knowledge, the study does show how being told to gesture can reveal previously unexpressed implicit knowledge that increases the likelihood of learning. As an avid gesturer, this is good news for me. Perhaps in the future, gesturing in the classroom will be encouraged and learners everywhere will be more capable of bringing out their implicit knowledge!<\/p>\n Reference:<\/p>\n Broaders, S. C., Cook, S. W., Mitchell, Z., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2007). Making children gesture brings out implicit knowledge and leads to learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology<\/i>,\u00a0136<\/i>, 539-550.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you ever completed a task but later you were unable to articulate what you did in order to succeed? For example, after I have completed a complicated math problem, I am typically unable to explain in words how I arrived at my answer. \u00a0When this occurs, we are said to have implicit knowledge of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4096,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[313,60348],"tags":[130394],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4096"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":946,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions\/946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}