Key Ideas

• Students must organize new and pre-existing knowledge to effectively learn new ideas.
• Concepts can be organized into abstract structures—such as cause-and-effect, classifications, hierarchies, and generalizations.
• Educators can support students’ understanding by demonstrating the conceptual structure of the content being taught.

Conceptual Structures in the Classroom

Students are required to understand increasingly complex material as they progress through school. Educators are responsible for teaching not only subject content, but also for developing students’ ability to comprehend new ideas with increasing levels of independence. One way to increase independent analytical ability is to teach about conceptual structures. Conceptual structures—such as cause-and-effect, classifications, hierarchies, and generalizations—describe relationships among concepts. People learn new ideas more deeply when information is organized—internally or externally—into conceptual structures.

While conceptual structures are abstract, they can be represented verbally and concretely.

For example, transition words, such as “first,” “next,” or “in contrast,” signal how one topic will relate to others. Furthermore, diagrams, outlines, and concept maps  can help students arrange and integrate knowledge. In elementary school, it is common for teachers to provide graphic organizers, such as Venn diagrams for comparing and contrasting information, or character webs and plot diagrams for narrative stories. These visual organizers allow children to externalize concept organization and learn common conceptual structures. For example, “paragraph burgers” help structure expressive writing. As students progress through school, they receive direct instruction on conceptual organization less often, as students are expected to to employ previously learned skills independently.

However, as subject material grows in difficulty, it is often difficult for students to generalize and apply previously learned strategies. In order to integrate new knowledge, students still need support to understand relationships among topics. High level subjects often have conventions for representing relationships, such as Δ (delta) for “change” and  arrows for chemical reactions. Students at all levels benefit when structures and their representations are explained in relation to the content.

Conceptual structures can be represented visually, (i.e. graphic organizers and outlines,) signaled verbally (i.e. transition words,) and indicated with symbols. New research has investigated whether educators can also use hand movements to help students understand the organization of the material being taught.

New Research

In a recent study, Celeste Pilegard and Logan Fiorella investigated the effects of different types of hand gestures on student learning. Specifically, Pilegard and Fiorella hypothesized that teachers who indicated the structure of the material with gestures would see the largest increases in student learning.

To test this, a little over a hundred college students watched video lessons about two types of steamboats. The 123 students were split into four groups to watch different versions of the video. In the first, the instructor utilized structure gestures to demonstrate the compare/contrast conceptual structure of the information. In this case, she gestured on one side of her body when discussing characteristics of the first type of steamboat and on the other side of her body when discussing the second type of steamboat. In the second, surface gestures indicated concrete characteristics: for instance, holding hands further apart when talking about a steamboat with a larger hull. The third video combined structure and surface gestures, while the fourth video only contained small, meaningless hand movements.

After watching the videos, the participants answered recall and inference questions about the content. They also rated their engagement with the lecturer. The researchers found support for their hypothesis: the use of structure gestures during teaching significantly improved the students’ ability to make inferences about the material. Interestingly, structure gestures did not significantly impact memory performance. In contrast, surface gestures did not have a significant effect on either type of question. Students who watched any of the videos with meaningful gestures rated higher levels of engagement with the lecturer.

Implications for Education

This research supports the hypothesis that using structural gestures—those that indicate the relationships among concepts—support higher level learning, in a way that other gestures do not. However, there were some substantial differences between the videos and actual teaching. The videos were substantially shorter (about one minute) and less complex than typical lessons for that grade range. Also, in order to control for the impact of gesturing, there were no other visual aids, such as pictures, diagrams, outlines, or slides. While these glaring differences make it difficult to predict the extent to which gestures can aid learning in more realistic settings, the findings nevertheless indicate two important considerations for education.

First, students at all grade levels benefit from explicit support on the conceptual structure of lessons.

• Organize lectures by topic and subtopic, and make the organization explicit through the use of outlines, heading hierarchy, and introduction and summary statements to each topic
• Make connections between previously learned material and new material; use analogies to compare the structures of complex concepts to easy-to-understand equivalents
• Utilize diagrams, flow charts, and other visual representations of text-heavy material

Second, structural gestures are one way to support students’ conceptual organization.

• Consider what your hands are doing while you are teaching. Utilize gestures that help students visualize relationships.
• When preparing the lesson, consider the interrelationships among or within topics. Ask yourself:
  • What type(s) of conceptual structure exists (cycle, hierarchy, compare/contrast, cause/effect…)?
  • How can I represent this structure visually, verbally, and/or via gesture?

Conceptual structures facilitate the organization of knowledge and the integration of new information. Teachers can support higher level understanding of material by explaining the conceptual structure of the material. Learners of all ages benefit from descriptions and representations of conceptual structures, such as diagrams, transition words, and gestures.

 

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Christine Bresnahan is a PhD student and adjunct professor at American University, where she researches and teaches about Educational Neuroscience and Special Education, with a focus on dyslexia and ADHD. Previously, she was an elementary special educator in a Massachusetts public school.

References

CAST (2018). Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 2.2. Retrieved from http://udlguidelines.cast.org

Pilegard, C., & Fiorella, L. (2021). Using gestures to signal lesson structure and foster meaningful learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 35(5), 1362–1369. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.3866

• Images:
  1. Teacher Photo courtesy of Dr. William Hobbs, Image Source
  2. Paragraph Burger retrieved from Reading Rockets
  3. Krebs Cycle diagram retrieved from learnbiology.com