Abstract
Systematic observations of student gestures can not only fill in gaps in students' verbal expressions, but can also offer valuable information about student ideas, including their source, their novelty to the speaker, and their construction in real time. This paper provides a review of the research in gesture analysis that is most relevant to physics education researchers and illustrates gesture analysis for the purpose of better understanding student thinking about physics.
Highlights
A student trying to decide whether an object in projectile motion has zero velocity at the top of its flight says “Wouldn’t it just fall straight down if it was like— Wmp! Psh.” The transcript of her verbalizations, in this case, is insufficient for us to understand her idea; in order to understand what the student is “saying,” we need to see her gesture
Gestures are one channel of the rich stream of data that is the basis of our investigations of student thinking
Research on gesture analysis appears in literature from cognitive science, linguistics, and learning sciences, and weaves together insights from these diverse traditions
Summary
A student trying to decide whether an object in projectile motion has zero velocity at the top of its flight says “Wouldn’t it just fall straight down if it was like— Wmp! Psh.” The transcript of her verbalizations, in this case, is insufficient for us to understand her idea; in order to understand what the student is “saying,” we need to see her gesture. The purpose of this paper is to show how physics education researchers may analyze gestures for the purpose of better understanding student thinking. In the first episodeSec. III, one key gesture is necessary for understanding the content of a particular student’s idea, and gives us evidence of the source of that idea—that it is something she constructed herself, rather than something conveyed to her by a teaching assistant. III, one key gesture is necessary for understanding the content of a particular student’s idea, and gives us evidence of the source of that idea—that it is something she constructed herself, rather than something conveyed to her by a teaching assistant This first episode serves as a context for exploring literature that uses gestures as indicators of the novelty of student ideas as well as their construction in real timeSec. IV. V: one in which a series of gestures provides evidence of the decreasing novelty of student ideas, and another in which gestures may provide students with particular cognitive resources for analyzing a collision
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