Research in Science Education: The Role of Gestures in Geoscience Teaching and Learning

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Gestures are an integral part of communication among people of all ages and cultures. People gesture during spontaneous conversations with friends. Teachers gesture when explaining a scientific concept to a class. Students gesture as they work together when learning a new scientific principle. So do scientists during lab-talk. Research has shown that are not merely idle arm-waving; they are profoundly connected to cognition and perception, and can convey subtle meanings that would be awkward or impossible to convey in language alone. For an educator or education researcher, can therefore provide a window into students' thought processes, even when the students do not articulate their understandings or misunderstandings in words. This column reviews seminal research on in the domains of problem solving, science education, field-based education, spatial tasks, and scientists' discourse. We present evidence that are of value for both gesturer and recipient, review hypotheses about why are valuable, analyze examples of gesture as used by both instructors and students while discussing geoscience topics, offer suggestions for geoscience educators, and conclude with directions for future research. EVIDENCE THAT GESTURES ARE BENEFICIAL FOR BOTH GESTURER AND RECIPIENT Research has shown that aid both the communicator and the recipient. In one illustrative study, college students were asked to assemble a TV cart using a photograph as a guide, and then make a video explaining how to assemble the cart (Lozano and Tv er sky, 2006). One group was allowed to both speak and gesture as they made the video. A second group was told that they were making the video for non-English speakers and thus could use only and actions, no speech. A control group merely assembled the cart a second time, without making a video. The videos were shown to new students, who were then asked to assemble the cart. As judged by number of errors during assembly, the students who viewed gesture-only videos significantly outperformed the students who viewed speech-and-gestures videos. Thus were shown to be beneficial for the recipient. The students who had made the videos were then surprised by a request to re-assemble an identical TV cart. Remarkably, the gesture-only group significantly outperformed the gesture-and-speech group, and greatly outperformed the control group, in terms of number of errors made during reassembly. Thus were shown to be beneficial for the gesturer as well as the recipient. Several other lines of research support the contention that benefit gesturer, recipient, or both, especially on spatially-demanding tasks. Raucher, et al. (1996) found that people who were prevented from gesturing while speaking about spatial content produced more dysfluencies per word than those who were allowed to gesture naturally. Erlich, et al. (2006) showed that children who produced movement while explaining how they solved a spatial transformation problem answered more test items correctly than did those who did not make such gestures. Similarly, Cook and Goldin-Meadow (2006) showed that children who gestured while explaining how they solved math equivalence problems answered more post-test questions correctly than children who did not gesture. Goodwin (2007) documents instances in which archeologists' discussions in the field are incomprehensible if and objects in the world are not considered as integral and essential components of the communication, and Roth (2000) makes much the same case for students in a physics laboratory. WHY ARE GESTURES BENEFICIAL? Researchers who address this question draw distinctions among several types of (McNeill, 1992), each of which has different uses. Here we focus on two: (1) Deictic gestures indicate entities, objects, direction, or other phenomena within the conversational space, usually by pointing. …