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 child...