33.078-16 - The Learning at Hand: Gesture Production in Virtual Pedagogical Agents

• In Event: 33.078 - Roundtable Session 11

Session Type: Roundtable Session

Abstract

Learning and teaching are social and embodied. Gesture, therefore, plays a valuable role in the design effective learning environments. This symposium brings together scholars from a variety of institutions and scholarly perspectives to present research on the nature of gesture as it is implemented in virtual pedagogical agents and its impact on mathematics and language learning. In addition to empirical presentations on the power of gesture to enhance learning, comprehension, and transfer, this session will explore two cross-cutting topics important to the advancement of virtual pedagogical agents: (1) What makes gesture special for learning? (2) What are the implications that the level of description used to encode pedagogical gestures has for student learning and development?

Sub Unit

• SIG-Advanced Technologies for Learning

Chair

• Mitchell J. Nathan, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Papers

• Effective Instructional Gestures: Design Principles for Virtual Pedagogical Agents - Mitchell J. Nathan, University of Wisconsin - Madison; Martha W. Alibali, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Math Learning From a Gesturing Avatar - Susan Wagner Cook, University of Iowa; Voicu Popescu, Purdue University

• Iconic Gestures Enhance Vocabulary Acquisition: A Virtual Pedagogical Agent as Foreign Language Trainer - Kirsten Bergmann, Bielefeld University

• Moving Targets: Representing and Simulating Choreographies of Multimodal Pedagogical Tactics for Virtual Agent Mathematics Tutors - Virginia J Flood, University of California - Berkeley; Alyse D Schneider, University of California - Berkeley; Dor Abrahamson, University of California - Berkeley