Reflection for Week 1: Gesturing gives children new ideas about math

Summary
According to previous studies, gesturing plays a positive role in children's learning. For example, children who are instructed to gesture while explaining how they solved a math question learn better in subsequent lessons than children asked not to gesture (Broaders, Cook, Mitchell, & Goldin-Meadow, 2007). The goal of this study was to find the mechanism by which gesturing helps children learn better. A group of children aged 9-10 were given a pretest with six mathematics problems, and only those who answered all the problems incorrectly were included in the study. These children were randomly assigned to three groups: the no-gesture condition, correct-gesture condition, and partially-correct-gesture condition. Those in the correct-gesture and partially-correct-gesture conditions were shown a mathematics question and taught some words and gestures, while those in the no-gesture condition were shown the same question and taught the same words without gestures. The children in all three groups were given a math lesson in which they were verbally taught how to solve a particular math problem, and no gestures were made by the teacher. After the lesson, the children were given a posttest with six mathematics problems that tested the same concepts as the pretest. They were also asked to explain how they solved each problem. The results of this study support the idea that gesturing improves students' performance by helping them verbally mention the concepts useful in solving questions.

First stop - Prelesson Instructions
The students in the no-gesture condition were presented with a problem: 6 + 3 + 4 = _ + 4, and taught the sentence, "I want to make one side equal to the other." The children in the partially-correct-gesture group were presented with the same problem and taught the same sentence; however, they were also instructed to point to 3 and 4 with V-shaped fingers and to the blank with the index finger. It's worth noting that the V-shaped fingers pointed at the wrong numbers in this gesture. The children in the correct-gesture condition were also presented with the same problem and sentence, and their gesture involved V-shaped fingers pointing to 6 and 3, with the index finger pointing to the blank. The gestures for all the groups are shown in the picture above. It was found that the more correct the children's gestures, the better their performance on the posttest, accounting for potential differences in their computation speeds.

Second stop - The Mediator Variable
There is a statistically significant positive relationship between correct gestures and the number of questions children answered correctly on the posttest. The researchers aimed to determine if the impact of correct gestures on children's performance is mediated by the addition of a grouping strategy to their speaking repertoires. A regression analysis was conducted, and the results are presented in the following figure.

If the effect of "adding grouping" to posttest performance is taken into account, the direct effect of gesture condition on posttest performance is significantly decreased. This implies that correct gestures have an indirect effect on the number of questions answered correctly, and this effect is mediated by the addition of grouping to children's speaking repertoires.

Questions
  • The hand movements were taught to children through rote memorization, so should they really be considered gestures?
  • Are the results of this study generalizable to other types of mathematical problems or children of other age groups?










Comments

  1. January 15, 2024 at 2:13 PM

    In our post, we said that "The goal of this study was to find the mechanism by which gesturing helps children learn better". I wonder if the authors discuss in more detail what are these mechanisms and if they are generalizable for other math content/competencies. I am curious about this because I would like to understand better the children's passage from concrete to abstract thinking and how gesturing mechanisms may or not be responsible for this passage.

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  2. AnitaJanuary 16, 2024 at 11:24 PM

    Karan, you have raised good questions. In my opinion, hand movements, although initially taught through rote memorization, should be considered gestures. Regular gestures usually come with talking and have a clear meaning. However, in this study, the hand movements were taught by memorization without an immediate meaning. They were based on movements commonly used by kids who know how to solve similar math problems. As the kids learned during the math lesson, these initially memorized movements made sense, showing that going from memorization to meaningful gestures might happen in many learning situations.
    In response to your second question, I want to convey that while the study provides valuable insights into the impact of gesturing on learning in the context of a specific type of mathematical problem, generalizing the findings to other types of problems should be done cautiously. The effectiveness of gesturing may depend on the nature of the task, the cognitive processes involved, and the specific strategies employed.
    As educators, we should generalize the findings about gesturing to different mathematical problems, age groups and education levels to see its effectiveness. So why not?
    I agree with Ariane as I, too, am curious about knowing more about the body movements and implications of different gestures to understand abstract concepts of math more concretely so that we, as educators, can design lessons to make math more enjoyable to our students.

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