Tacit Gesture Elicitation: Classroom Prompts Leading to Student Gestures

• In Event: Learning and the Growing Body: Embodied Learning Research Across Different Age Groups

Abstract

Producing spontaneous gestures has been found to impact learning (Kita et al., 2017). Most studies request students to repeat the instructor’s hand movement (e.g., Cherdieu et al., 2017; Vest et al., 2022), and some strategically use visuals to cue the movement and position of the student’s hands (e.g., Zhang et al., 2021). However, tacitly eliciting students to gesture spontaneously is a challenge. Evidence shows that by observing gestured instruction, students increase their production of spontaneous gestures (e.g., Cherdieu et al., 2017; Cook et al., 2010). When it comes to verbal gesture elicitation, most researchers use the prompt “use your hands” (e.g., Broaders et al., 2007; Novack & Goldin-Meadow, 2015). Nonetheless, are there other classroom verbal prompts that lead students to gesture spontaneously? Understanding the classroom conditions that lead students to use their hands while learning challenging math concepts could help teachers and students capitalize on gesture benefits for learning.
The present study examined 11 video-recorded fraction lessons (352 minutes) of 11 fourth-grade teachers and their 65 students. All the participant teachers taught the same lesson (i.e., Lesson 3-6 “Fraction Comparison”) from the same curriculum, Everyday Mathematics (everydaymath.uchicago.edu). First, we identified all student mathematics-related gestures and categorized them as representational (including iconic and metaphoric) and pointing gestures given their important role in mathematical learning (Alibali & Nathan, 2012). Then, we traced back to who prompted the gestures and how. To understand the who, the agents responsible for gesture prompts were categorized as teacher, self-prompts, and peers. To understand the how, the teacher prompts preceding gestures were classified as factual (i.e., questions that require fact retrieval or result of a math problem), higher-order (i.e., prompts that focus on the process or strategies used), and request for actions. The self-prompts preceding gestures were classified as question, elaboration, and no speech (i.e., instances where students gestured without verbal utterance during the lesson). We also searched for all instances of these prompts within a 4-minute window, to assess the probability that those prompts reliably led to student gestures.
Logistic regression analyses revealed that students were more likely to gesture when they were self-prompted than teacher-prompted. Furthermore, students are more likely to produce gestures during self-prompted elaborations and after teachers’ higher-order prompts. We also found that students produced more concatenated gestures after teachers used higher-order prompts than factual prompts. These results show that students produced gestures more often and richly when encouraged to talk about mathematical processes and strategies than when asked to share a mathematical fact or result. This study provides new insight into the classroom conditions (particularly the verbal prompts) that elicit students’ embodied mathematical thinking.

Authors

• Tiffany Reyes-Denis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Michelle Perry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign