Brad:> WHEN USING GESTURES, RULES OF GRAMMAR REMAIN THE SAME
http://www.physorg.com/news134065200.html
Thankyou. I'm v. interested in this sort of thing. Using gestures also
apparently improves learning significantly -see below. All this is v.
important for AGI because it goes to confirm what for me is a basic truth -
intelligence is primarily about building and manipulating physical,
imaginative models of the world. The evolution of intelligence is the story
of species constructing ever more complex imaginative world models. Symbols
come in so late because they are merely tools - labels - that enable us to
do that, in still more complex and effective ways, even if, while we use
them, the underlying physical models become to a considerable degree
unconscious.
"Hand gestures dramatically improve learning
Wed, 07/25/2007 - 15:42 - NLN
Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times
more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned. In today's
issue of the journal Cognition, a University of Rochester scientist suggests
it's possible to help children learn difficult concepts by providing
gestures as an additional and potent avenue for taking in information.
"We've known for a while that we use gestures to add information to a
conversation even when we're not entirely clear how that information relates
to what we're saying," says Susan Wagner Cook, lead author and postdoctoral
fellow at the University. "We asked if the reverse could be true; if
actively employing gestures when learning helps retain new information."
It turned out to have a more dramatic effect than Cook expected. In her
study, 90 percent of students who had learned algebraic concepts using
gestures remembered them three weeks later. Only 33 percent of speech-only
students who had learned the concept during instruction later retained the
lesson. And perhaps most astonishing of all, 90 percent of students who had
learned by gesture alone -- no speech at all -- recalled what they'd been
taught.
Cook used a variation on a classic gesturing experiment. When third graders
approach a two-sided algebra equation, such as "9+3+6=__+6" on a blackboard,
they will likely try to solve it in the simple way they have always
approached math problems. They tend to think in terms of "the equal sign
means put the answer here," rather than thinking that the equal sign divides
the problem into two halves. As a result, children often completely ignore
the final "+6."
However, even when children discard that final integer, they will often
point to it momentarily as they explain how they attacked the problem. Those
children who gestured to the number, even though they may seem to ignore it,
are demonstrating that they have a piece of information they can't
reconcile. Previous work has shown that the children with that extra bit of
disconnected knowledge are the ones ready to learn, which suggests that
perhaps giving children extra information in their gesture could lead to
their learning.
Cook divided 84 third and fourth graders into three groups. One group
expressed the concept verbally without being allowed to use gestures. The
second group was allowed to use only gestures and no speech, and the third
group employed both. Teachers gave all the children the same instruction,
which used both speech and gesture.
After three weeks, the children were given regular in-school math tests. Of
those children who had learned to solve the problem correctly, only a third
of the speech-only students remembered the principles involved, but that
figure rose dramatically for the speech-and-gesture, and the gesture-only
group, to 90-percent retention.
"My intuition is that gestures enhance learning because they capitalize on
our experience acting in the world," says Cook. "We have a lot of experience
learning through interacting with our environment as we grow, and my guess
is that gesturing taps into that need to experience."
Cook plans to look into how gesturing could be implemented effectively in
classrooms to make a noticeable improvement in children's learning.
"Gesturing does have one clear benefit," Cook adds. "It's free."
University of Rochester"
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agi
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