This given article is an interesting study about the impact of teacher's gestures (as pointing and tracing) while doing instructions on their student's learning in math class. Author used an experimental method to show there is more learning and student's response if teaching was conducted in classes with speech and gestures instead of only speech. The author chose a symmetry lesson to show via video-taped to the children with both ways as a verbal-only lesson and verbal-plus-gesture lesson. It was anticipated and experienced that children who experienced and watched verbal-plus-gesture lessons, were more efficient to have knowledge about that topic instead of other students who watched only verbal lessons on symmetry. The author have also explained three mechanisms for teacher's gestures which helped their student's to capture the concept of selected lesson easily as teacher's gestures helps to capture and maintain the student's attention, teacher's gestures help to noticing the information, teacher's gestures helps to ground the speech with concrete objects and help to relate with our environment. The author has discussed the limitation of the given study as it was limited to experimental study by showing video-taped lessons and considering only a single concept of symmetry; still it gives us a sight of right use and importance of gestures used in teaching-learning process.
- "Student's comprehension may be challenged by instructional discourse that presents new concepts and use unfamiliar terms" (p.188). It is considerable to think on this point, sometimes very difficult vocabulary and complex sentences have been used in the simple concepts to present it in complicated ways; this presents the perplexed situation in front of students that what to think about difficulty of presentation of the topic or meaning of the concept.
- "Goldin-Meadow et al. concluded that gestures facilitated children's comprehension of teacher's speech when it matched speech, and hindered children's comprehension of teacher's speech when it mismatched speech" (p.189). From my perception this is truly an important point to consider that wise use of gestures are important to convey the right message to the students and not only just to use gestures when that is required or not.
- What would be mismatched gestures and speech in mathematical content and context, which might convey wrong information to the students in the math classroom?
It's challenging to think of an example of mismatched gesture and speech in our math classrooms. A mismatch would certainly confuse students. I took a quick look at the study by Goldin-Meadow et al. Their participants were 5 to 8-year-olds, much younger than students I teach. The example was when a child talked about the width of a dish but used gestures to show the height. I wonder if we would find more examples of such mismatch among younger learners, as they may not have good grasps of the language terms they use.
ReplyDeleteThe first point reminded me about our discussion about supporting ELL students. We often consider simplifying sentences and using visuals to help illustrate concepts better to ELL students. However, I think we should consider gestures, too!
I will echo what Erica said, it is difficult to determine what gestures would lead to conveying wrong information. I think geometry and graphs and other things that have some way we usually draw them would make providing helpful gestures easier. Both the teacher and students have an image of what the gesture could mean. For more numerical math I think there is more room for confusion. Take dividing by fractions, the simplified rule states keep, change, flip. What gestures would be good for showing this? How would the gestures for change and flip not be confused? I am also now considering the uniqueness of the gestures. Do gestures need to be unique? Would it help is a gesture was repeated, for example a gesture for “repeated” used in explaining multiplication as repeated addition and division as repeated subtraction?
ReplyDeleteHmmmm...! Madison was the one in your group who read the Singer & Goldin-Meadow (2005) about how gesture mismatches actually HELP students learn better! But now I see the reference in the Alibali et al article to an earlier article by Goldin-Meadow and collaborators (1999) where they say the opposite -- that MATCHING gestures are what support learning best! Fascinating to see the development of this idea over time, and it would be interesting to read and compare the two Goldin-Meadow coauthored articles (1999 and then 2005) and to consider the differences.
ReplyDelete"Matching" seems to be common sense for teachers, if we're thinking in a very literal, step by step way. The assumption is that kids need a very deliberate, explicit and teacher-led kind of guidance to take up a new concept, and of course, that can work. But when everything is 'fed' to kids through super-literal, very deliberate teacher talk, is there any space for kids to make the knowledge their own, through exploration, experimentation, trying to find counterexamples, discussing with peers, problem-solving and other ways? And as teachers, how much of our time with kids should be spent with US doing the mathematics, carefully choosing our words and gestures (and this certainly does have a place in our repertoire!), and how much time should the kids be wrestling with concepts, resources and problems to be actually doing mathematics? Sorry for the rant, and I think I've moved away from mismatching gestures, but I would not really recommend the matching of everything in math class!