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Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better

During mathematics instruction, teachers often make links between different representations of mathematical information, and they sometimes use gestures to refer to the representations that they link. In this research, we investigated the role of such gestures in students’ learning from lessons abou...

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Autores principales: Yeo, Amelia, Ledesma, Iasmine, Nathan, Mitchell J., Alibali, Martha W., Church, R. Breckinridge
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer International Publishing 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5655596/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29104912
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41235-017-0077-0
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author Yeo, Amelia
Ledesma, Iasmine
Nathan, Mitchell J.
Alibali, Martha W.
Church, R. Breckinridge
author_facet Yeo, Amelia
Ledesma, Iasmine
Nathan, Mitchell J.
Alibali, Martha W.
Church, R. Breckinridge
author_sort Yeo, Amelia
collection PubMed
description During mathematics instruction, teachers often make links between different representations of mathematical information, and they sometimes use gestures to refer to the representations that they link. In this research, we investigated the role of such gestures in students’ learning from lessons about links between linear equations and corresponding graphs. Eighty-two middle-school students completed a pretest, viewed a video lesson, and then completed a posttest comparable to the pretest. In all of the video lessons, the teacher explained the links between equations and graphs in speech. The lessons varied in whether the teacher referred to the equations in gesture and in whether she referred to the graphs in gesture, yielding four conditions: neither equations nor graphs, equations only, graphs only, and both equations and graphs. In all conditions, the gestures were redundant with speech, in the sense that the referents of the gestures were also mentioned in speech (e.g., pointing to “2” while saying “2”). Students showed substantial learning in all conditions. However, students learned less when the teacher referred to the equations in gesture than when she did not. This was not the case for gesture to graphs. These findings are discussed in terms of the processing implications of redundancy between gesture and speech, and the possibility of “trade-offs” in attention to the visual representations. The findings underscore the need for a more nuanced view of the role of teachers’ gestures in students’ comprehension and learning. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41235-017-0077-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-56555962017-11-01 Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better Yeo, Amelia Ledesma, Iasmine Nathan, Mitchell J. Alibali, Martha W. Church, R. Breckinridge Cogn Res Princ Implic Original Article During mathematics instruction, teachers often make links between different representations of mathematical information, and they sometimes use gestures to refer to the representations that they link. In this research, we investigated the role of such gestures in students’ learning from lessons about links between linear equations and corresponding graphs. Eighty-two middle-school students completed a pretest, viewed a video lesson, and then completed a posttest comparable to the pretest. In all of the video lessons, the teacher explained the links between equations and graphs in speech. The lessons varied in whether the teacher referred to the equations in gesture and in whether she referred to the graphs in gesture, yielding four conditions: neither equations nor graphs, equations only, graphs only, and both equations and graphs. In all conditions, the gestures were redundant with speech, in the sense that the referents of the gestures were also mentioned in speech (e.g., pointing to “2” while saying “2”). Students showed substantial learning in all conditions. However, students learned less when the teacher referred to the equations in gesture than when she did not. This was not the case for gesture to graphs. These findings are discussed in terms of the processing implications of redundancy between gesture and speech, and the possibility of “trade-offs” in attention to the visual representations. The findings underscore the need for a more nuanced view of the role of teachers’ gestures in students’ comprehension and learning. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s41235-017-0077-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Springer International Publishing 2017-10-25 /pmc/articles/PMC5655596/ /pubmed/29104912 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41235-017-0077-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Original Article
Yeo, Amelia
Ledesma, Iasmine
Nathan, Mitchell J.
Alibali, Martha W.
Church, R. Breckinridge
Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better
title Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better
title_full Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better
title_fullStr Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better
title_full_unstemmed Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better
title_short Teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better
title_sort teachers’ gestures and students’ learning: sometimes “hands off” is better
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5655596/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29104912
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41235-017-0077-0
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