Monday, July 30, 2007

Gesturing at math problems makes the learning process three times more effective

A friend told me about the ScienceDaily mailing list. Each week I get an email with a list of links to recent articles about the latest research news. To join, go here.

This week's email had a list to an article titled Hand Gestures Dramatically Improve Learning. Some researchers found that children who were "asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned."

It sort of sounds like Thomas Armstrong's book Multiple Intelligence, but the study here found that gestures helped most of the children.

Maybe as teach our chlidren, we need to have them be more physically active.


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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

If I remember correctly this is one of the essential elements of Slingerland. It's a very, very effective way to teach reading and writing to dyslexic kids. That's cool to see it works so well in other subjects, too.

Anonymous said...

LOL! How do you teach something WITHOUT hand gestures?! I can't even talk more-or-less teach without gesturing. LOL!

Anonymous said...

Yeah, it also helps if you're Italian! LOL

Anonymous said...

Hi my name is Jonathan.

I teach math through visualisation and imagined hand gestures.

I also provide free math lessons for homeschoolers at www.whitemath.com

Perhaps I could give you some content? I like your blog!

Let me know,

Best wishes,
Jonathan