Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 128, January 2019, Pages 345-352
Computers & Education

Instructors’ pointing gestures improve learning regardless of their use of directed gaze in video lectures

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.10.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Students viewing the video lectures with instructor's pointing gestures showed better learning performance.

  • Students viewing the video lectures with instructor's pointing gestures were more efficient visual search.

  • Students viewing the video lectures with instructor's pointing gestures paid greater attention to the essential learning content.

Abstract

Empirical research to date has not distinguished the effects of the instructor's pointing gestures from directed gaze in video lectures. This study tested the hypothesis that the pointing gesture is superior to directed gaze in enhancing video lecture learning. Participants (n = 120) watched one of four types of video lecture in which the instructor either (a) looked straight into the camera with no gaze shift and without pointing gesture; (b) made occasional gaze shifts and without pointing gesture; (c) looked straight into the camera with no gaze shift and pointed to the relevant areas of the slide; or (d) made occasional gaze shifts accompanied by pointing gestures towards the slides. ANOVAs found that students in the conditions that included the instructor's pointing gesture showed better learning performance, more efficient visual search, and greater attention to the learning content that the instructor was referring to, regardless of her use of directed gaze. The implication for education is that instructors should use pointing gestures, with or without directed gaze, to guide students' attention and improve their learning in video lectures.

Introduction

Suppose an instructor wants to use a video lecture to explain how creatures reproduce and clone, but the students lack relevant prior knowledge. As information is presented on the slides and then disappears, it is crucial for students to effectively visually search for what is relevant to the topic. What can the instructor do to improve students' visual search and potentially improve their learning performance? The instructor might use pointing gestures to guide students’ visual attention to the learning content that they are referring to. Pointing gestures indicate objects or locations in a shared physical environment, typically made with an extended finger or hand (e.g., pointing to a flower in the vase to indicate that flower; Goldin-Meadow, 2014; McNeill, 1992).

Can an instructor's pointing gestures help students learn? Previous research has shown that when the instructor used pointing gestures, students paid greater attention to the learning content and learned more (Koumoutsakis, Church, Alibali, Singer, & Ayman-Nolley, 2016; Moreno, Reislein, & Ozogul, 2010; Pi, Hong, & Yang, 2017; Rueckert, Church, Avila, & Trejo, 2017). For example, in a study by Pi et al. (2017), participants viewed a video lecture about adjustment of curve in Photoshop. The researchers compared the attention allocation and learning performance of participants who viewed the video lecture with and without the instructor's pointing gestures. When the instructor used pointing gestures, the participants looked longer at the relevant learning content and showed better learning performance.

In most of the studies investigating the effect of the instructor's pointing gestures, including the one just discussed, the researchers did not distinguish the effect of the instructor's pointing gestures from the effect of directed gaze (Pi et al., 2017; Rueckert et al., 2017). The instructor's directed gaze in a video lecture refers to the instructor shifting his or her gaze from the camera to the learning content being talked about (van Wermeskerken & van Gog, 2017). There is a difference between an instructor looking straight into the camera while producing pointing gestures and an instructor looking straight at the learning content on the slide while producing pointing gestures (Ouwehand, van Gog, & Paas, 2015). In the first condition, the instructor guides the students with pointing gestures, whereas in the second condition, the instructor not only uses pointing gestures but also uses directed gaze to guide students.

Both the instructor's pointing gestures and directed gaze accompany speech to produce social cues that are an integral part of teaching, even in video lectures (Ouwehand et al., 2015). However, recent studies on the role of the instructor's directed gaze in video lectures (Ouwehand et al., 2015; van Gog, Verveer, & Verveer, 2014; van Wermeskerken & van Gog, 2017) showed that the instructor's directed gaze effectively improved students' attention to the areas of the slide that the instructor was referring to, but did not improve students' learning performance. Therefore, we assume that the instructor's pointing gesture might be superior to directed gaze in enhancing video lecture learning.

Despite the null findings with regard to the effects of directed gaze on learning performance, several instructional design theories, such as Mayer's cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML) and Sweller's cognitive load theory (CLT), posit that both pointing gesture and directed gaze should improve learning (Mayer, 2005; Sweller, 1988). Both theories stress that students' working memory capacity is limited, with the result being that they can allocate their attention only to a small portion of incoming information at once (Baddeley, 1992). The implication is that video lectures should be designed to reduce extraneous processing, such as visual search on the screen for the content that the instructor is referring to, especially if the information shown on the screen is transient. Adding pointing gestures and directed gaze in video lectures might reduce students' extraneous visual search, as they guide students' attention to the key information (Ouwehand et al., 2015; Pi et al., 2017; van Wermeskerken & van Gog, 2017). Therefore, students do not waste limited cognitive capacity on unnecessary visual searches, and they will be able to engage in the cognitive processing needed for learning, namely integrating the instructor's oral explanation and visual information into a coherent mental model.

Although previous studies provided evidence of the potential benefits of the instructor's pointing gestures in video lectures, they did not distinguish the effect of the instructor's pointing gestures from the effect of his or her directed gaze (Pi et al., 2017; Rueckert et al., 2017). Furthermore, these studies tested students' visual attention based on dwell time or percentage dwell time (Ouwehand et al., 2015; van Wermeskerken & van Gog, 2017), which are believed to reflect the time used to process information (Holmqvist et al., 2011); however, these measures cannot detect whether the instructor's pointing gesture and directed gaze guide students' attention to the target area at the appropriate time. First fixation time may be a useful measure of the timeliness of the visual search (Yan et al., 2013). First fixation time refers to the point in time when the participant first looked at the specific area of interest; the shorter the first fixation time, the greater the efficiency of the visual search. Therefore, we tested the effects of the instructor's pointing gestures and directed gaze on attention as assessed by both first fixation time and percentage dwell time.

The current study tested the effects of the instructor's pointing gesture and directed gaze in a video lecture by measuring students' learning performance (retention and transfer) and attention. Participants watched a video lecture showing an instructor verbally explaining the topic of creature reproduction and cloning in one of four conditions: the instructor looking straight into the camera without pointing gestures (no social cues condition), making occasional gaze shifts toward relevant areas of the slide without pointing gestures (directed gaze condition), looking straight into the camera and pointing to the relevant areas of the slide that they were referring to (pointing gesture condition), or making occasional gaze shifts accompanied by pointing gestures toward the slides (directed gaze + pointing gesture condition). Based on CTML, CLT, and previous studies, we formulated the following hypotheses:

  • (1)

    Students in the directed gaze + pointing gesture condition would show the best retention, followed by students in the pointing gesture condition, students in the directed gaze condition, and finally students in the no social cues condition.

  • (2)

    Students in the directed gaze + pointing gesture condition would show the best transfer, followed by students in the pointing gesture condition, students in the directed gaze condition, and finally students in the no social cues condition.

  • (3)

    Students in the directed gaze + pointing gesture condition would show most efficient visual search, as indicated by first fixation time to the learning content that the instructor was referring to, followed by students in the pointing gesture condition, students in the directed gaze condition, and finally students in the no social cues condition.

  • (4)

    Students in the directed gaze + pointing gesture condition would pay more visual attention, as indicated by percentage dwell time on the learning content that the instructor was referring to, followed by students in the pointing gesture condition, students in the directed gaze condition, and finally students in the no social cues condition.

Section snippets

Participants and design

Participants were 120 undergraduate and graduate students (27 males and 93 females) recruited from a Chinese university via advertisements posted on bulletin boards in the main teaching buildings. Their ages ranged from 17 to 35 years old (M = 21.25, SD = 2.52). Based on information that they provided in an informal interview before the experiment, participants had a wide range of majors (e.g., psychology, chemistry, history), but none were familiar with the topic presented in the video

Results

Descriptive statistics for all variables are shown in Table 1. A series of four analyses of variance (ANOVAs) with the experimental condition (no social cues vs. directed gaze vs. pointing gesture vs. directed gaze + pointing gesture) as the between-subjects factor were conducted on the retention test score, the transfer test score, mean first fixation time on AOIs, and mean percentage dwell time on AOIs.

Discussion

The main aim of the present study was to compare the effects of two types of instructor behavior in video lectures, namely directed gaze and pointing gesture, on students' learning performance and attention. Students in the conditions that included the instructor's pointing gesture not only showed better learning performance, but also efficiently searched for and paid greater attention to the area of the slide that the instructor was referring to. The findings indicated that the instructor's

Statements on ethics and conflict of interest

Before we conducted this study, we reported it to the Ethics Committee of the School of Psychology at Central China Normal University and received permission from the committee to conduct the research. In our study, all participants were volunteers who provided written informed consent. Furthermore, they knew that they had the right to withdraw from the study at any time during the experiment. We used numbers to refer to the participants instead of their names. Their data were only used for the

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Research Projects of the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education (17YJAZH104); Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (GK201803076); the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M631118); and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31470977; 31871118).

References (17)

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