Don't Just Tell Them, Show Them! Teachers Can Intentionally Alter their Instructional Gestures

Don’t Just Tell Them, Show Them! Teachers Can Intentionally Alter their Instructional Gestures Autumn B. Hostetter (abhostetter@wisc.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison 1202 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706 USA Kristen Bieda (bieda@wisc.edu) Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison 225 N. Mills St., Madison, WI 53706 USA Martha W. Alibali (mwalibali@wisc.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin–Madison 1202 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706 USA Mitchell J. Nathan (mnathan@wisc.edu) Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison 1025 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706 USA Eric J. Knuth (knuth@education.wisc.edu) Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison 225 N. Mills St., Madison, WI 53706 USA Abstract Because gestures can ground abstract ideas in the physical world and make connections between ideas, they play a potentially important role in the classroom. This study examined whether teachers can intentionally alter their gesture production. Six teachers taught a brief mathematics lesson three times, once without any special instructions, once attempting to use gestures to link ideas, and once attempting to inhibit all gestures. All 6 teachers were able both to increase and inhibit their gesture production when asked to do so. These results suggest that teachers can alter their gesture production. This is promising evidence that interventions that require teachers to alter their gestures are feasible. Introduction Teachers often face the challenging task of helping their students see connections between different ideas, events, or lessons. For example, a science teacher may wish to demonstrate the similarities between the organs inside the pig her students are dissecting and the organs inside their own bodies. A reading teacher may wish to demonstrate the relations between the events in the story the students are reading and events in the real world. A math teacher may wish to illustrate the connections between the equations the students are writing and the physical situation the equations model. Explaining connections between ideas is a complex process, one that is successful only if students can ground their understanding of one event or idea in their understanding of the other. One tool that teachers may use to help students see connections and ground their understanding of abstract ideas in the physical world is representational gestures. Representational gestures accomplish this grounding by directing attention to the referents for speech or by physically realizing those referents. Pointing gestures can explicitly direct students’ attention to a physically present referent. Iconic gestures can use the shape or motion of the hands to mime a key aspect of the referent. The imagistic information conveyed by gestures may benefit learning. Dual Coding Theory (Paivio, 1986) suggests that memory is enhanced when imagistic information is incorporated during encoding. Indeed, there is growing evidence that students benefit from their teachers’ gestures. Research shows that children can detect conceptual information that others express in gestures (Kelly & Church, 1998). Furthermore, the information that teachers express in gestures appears to influence learning. Many studies have shown improved performance on a posttest after a lesson that contained gestures compared to a lesson that did not contain gestures (Church, Ayman-Nolley, & Maldonado, 2005; Perry, Birch, & Singleton, 1995; Valenzeno, Alibali, & Klatzky, 2003). For example, Church, Ayman-Nolley, and Maldonado (2005) found that 4 th grade students who witnessed a lesson about equations that contained both speech and gesture solved three times more equations correctly on a posttest than students who witnessed a lesson that did not contain gestures. Gestures appear to be a helpful classroom tool, and indeed, teachers spontaneously use gestures in their lessons. Flevares and Perry (2001) found that first-grade teachers used 5 to 7 “nonspoken representations” per minute in lessons about place value, and most involved gestures. Alibali and Nathan (2005) describe the gestures of one teacher giving a math lesson about how to compute the area of a rectangle. The teacher used gesture to trace the length of the rectangle while