Teachers’ gestures facilitate students’ learning: A lesson in symmetry

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Abstract

This study investigated whether teachers’ gestures influence students’ comprehension of instructional discourse, and thereby influence students’ learning. Pointing and tracing gestures “ground” teachers’ speech by linking abstract, verbal utterances to the concrete, physical environment. We hypothesize that such grounding should facilitate students’ comprehension, and therefore their learning, of instructional material. Preschool children viewed one of two videotaped lessons about the concept of symmetry. In the verbal-plus-gesture lesson, the teacher produced pointing and tracing gestures as she explained the concept. In the verbal-only lesson, the teacher did not produce any gestures. On the posttest, children were asked to judge six items as symmetrical or asymmetrical, and to explain their judgments. Children who saw the verbal-plus-gesture lesson scored higher on the posttest than children who saw the verbal-only lesson. Thus, teachers’ gestures can indeed facilitate student learning. The results suggest that gestures may play an important role in instructional communication.

Introduction

Students do not always understand what their teachers try to tell them. What factors influence whether or not students comprehend and learn from instructional discourse? It seems likely that the same factors that influence listeners’ comprehension of oral language might influence students’ comprehension of instructional discourse. One such factor is the non-verbal support for language comprehension that is provided by speakers’ gestures. Previous studies have shown that speakers’ gestures facilitate listeners’ comprehension of speech, particularly when the verbal message is ambiguous (Thompson & Massaro, 1986), highly complex (Graham & Heywood, 1976; McNeil, Alibali, & Evans, 2000), or uttered in a soft voice (Berger & Popelka, 1971).

Students’ comprehension may be challenged by instructional discourse that presents new concepts and uses unfamiliar terms. This study investigates whether teachers’ gestures influence students’ comprehension of instructional discourse, and thereby influence students’ learning. Most previous research on gesture in instructional settings has focused on children’s gestures (e.g., Crowder, 1996; Crowder & Newman, 1993; Moschkovich, 1996; Perry, Church, & Goldin-Meadow, 1988) or on whether teachers can glean information from children’s gestures (e.g., Alibali, Flevares, & Goldin-Meadow, 1997; Goldin-Meadow, Wein, & Chang, 1992). In contrast, the goal of the present study is to investigate whether children glean information from teachers’ gestures. We focus on the role of gesture in conveying substantive information relevant to the lesson content, rather than regulatory information (e.g., facilitating turn-taking in classroom interaction) or affective information (e.g., information about attitudes, immediacy, or warmth; Andersen & Andersen, 1982).

There is ample evidence that speakers’ gestures can convey meaning in ordinary face-to-face interactions (see Kendon, 1994; for a review). Furthermore, previous research has documented that teachers do indeed use gestures in classroom settings (Flevares & Perry, 2001; Neill, 1991; Neill & Carswell, 1993; Zukow-Goldring, Romo, & Duncan, 1994). However, as yet, there is little empirical evidence about whether teachers’ gestures actually affect students’ learning. Only two studies to our knowledge have directly examined the influence of teachers’ gestures on students’ understanding (Berch, Singleton, & Perry, 1995; Goldin-Meadow, Kim, & Singer, 1999). Both focused on students learning to solve mathematical equivalence problems (e.g., 3 + 4 + 5=3 + __), and both focused on individual interactions between a student and another person. One study examined students’ learning from real teachers naive to the experimental hypothesis (Goldin-Meadow et al., 1999), and the other examined students’ learning from an experimenter who served as the instructor (Berch et al., 1995).

The Goldin-Meadow et al. (1999) study focused on students’ “uptake” of information from the preceding conversational turn. The primary finding was that students were more likely to reiterate the information the teacher conveyed in speech on the preceding turn when the teacher’s speech was accompanied by a matching gesture, which was defined as a gesture that conveyed the same information as speech, and therefore reinforced the verbal message. In addition, students were less likely to reiterate the information the teacher conveyed in speech on the preceding turn when the teacher’s speech was accompanied by a mismatching gesture, defined as a gesture that conveyed different information from speech, and therefore did not reinforce the verbal message. Goldin–Meadow et al. concluded that gesture facilitated children’s comprehension of teachers’ speech when it matched speech, and hindered children’s comprehension of teachers’ speech when it mismatched speech. However, Goldin–Meadow et al. did not examine whether students’ uptake of teacher’s information predicted whether or how much students learned from the tutorial interaction.

Berch et al. (1995) compared students’ learning from speech accompanied by gesture and speech alone. Students initially received one of two lessons about mathematical equivalence, one that included gestures and one that did not. Following the lesson, students completed a posttest, and students who did not succeed on the posttest then received the other of the two lessons. The primary finding was that more students succeeded on the problems after the verbal-plus-gesture lesson than after the verbal-only lesson. However, the differences were small at each time point, and no statistical analysis was reported, so no firm conclusions can be drawn.

The goal of the present study was to examine the effects of teachers’ gestures on children’s learning. To address this issue, we selected the concept of bilateral symmetry as the target concept. We chose this concept for three reasons. First, previous work on gesture and learning has focused primarily on mathematical problem solving in the elementary grades. We wished to extend this research to a new task and age group. Second, the concept of bilateral symmetry is fairly simple and can be readily learned by young children, but it is often not directly taught until the early elementary grades. Therefore, we expected that preschool students would not already be familiar with the concept. Third, we wished to use a concept that teachers would ordinarily explain using gestures. Because symmetry is a visuo-spatial concept, it fulfilled this criterion. Indeed, because gestures are themselves visuo-spatial, they may be especially important for communicating about visuo-spatial concepts.

To decide what types of teacher gestures to include in our experiment, we drew on previous research that examined gesture production among real teachers in real classroom settings. One such study showed that teachers frequently use pointing and tracing gestures (Alibali, Sylvan, Fujimori, & Kawanaka, 1997; see also Fujimori, 1997). These investigators analyzed five fifth-grade geometry lessons about how to find the area of a triangle. The lessons had been videotaped in real mathematics classrooms, three in the United States and two in Japan, and were drawn from a dataset collected by Jim Stigler and Giyoo Hatano. Both American and Japanese teachers used gestures primarily to guide students’ attention. For example, one American teacher said, “There’s another way of writing this” while pointing to a formula written on the board. As a second example, one Japanese teacher said, “See this triangle?” (Kono sankakkei arimasune) while tracing the perimeter of a triangle that had been drawn on the board. We suggest that such gestures “ground” teachers’ talk by linking the abstract, verbal utterance to the concrete, physical environment. We hypothesize that such grounding should facilitate student’s comprehension, and therefore their learning, of instructional material. Therefore, the lessons that we constructed for the present experiment varied the teacher’s use of pointing and tracing gestures.

We compared children’s learning from two lessons, one that included gestures and one that did not. In the verbal-only lesson, the teacher did not produce any gestures. In the verbal-plus-gesture lesson, the teacher used pointing and tracing gestures, such as pointing to individual shapes or tracing shapes’ features. The audio portion of the lesson was identical in the two conditions. We hypothesized that children would learn more when teachers used gesture to ground their instructional discourse; therefore, we predicted that children in the verbal-plus-gesture lesson group would be better able than children in the verbal-only lesson group to identify symmetrical and asymmetrical items in a posttest. Furthermore, we predicted that children in the verbal-plus-gesture lesson group would be better able to explain why items are or are not symmetrical. Finally, because pointing and tracing gestures are used to guide students’ attention, we hypothesized that students would pay more attention to the verbal-plus-gesture lesson than to the verbal-only lesson.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 25 children (12 boys and 13 girls) from two classrooms at a university laboratory preschool. The sample was predominantly Caucasian (84%) and predominantly middle to upper-middle class. The children ranged from 4 years, 2 months, to 5 years, 3 months, with a mean age of 4 years, 6 months.

Procedure

Children were brought individually to a testing room that contained a table, two chairs and a small television-VCR unit. A video camera was set up approximately 6 from the table. The child

Pretest performance

None of the children succeeded on both parts of the pretest. When asked what it means for something to be symmetrical, two children provided a reasonable answer. However, both of these children circled non-symmetrical items when asked to find the items that were symmetrical on the pretest worksheet (one circled the mitten, and the other circled both the mitten and the letter C). Another child circled the correct items (the cross and the heart) when asked to find the items that were symmetrical;

Discussion

In brief, children who viewed the lesson that included gestures learned more than children who viewed the lesson that did not include gestures. Thus, teachers’ pointing and tracing gestures can indeed facilitate student learning. This study adds to the growing body of evidence showing that gestures do play a role in language comprehension. Further, this study illustrates this point in a context in which comprehension is of great importance—a lesson in which a new concept is being presented. We

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on a Senior Honors Thesis conducted at Carnegie Mellon University by Laura Valenzeno, under the direction of Roberta Klatzky and Martha Alibali. Support was provided by a grant from the Undergraduate Research Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. We are grateful to Sharon Carver, Jean Simpson, and the students, teachers, and parents at the Carnegie Mellon University Children’s School, who made this work possible. We also thank Eric Seshens for help in developing the

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