Hand Gesture and Mathematics Learning: Lessons From an Avatar

Abstract

A beneficial effect of gesture on learning has been demonstrated in multiple domains, including mathematics, science, and foreign language vocabulary. However, because gesture is known to co-vary with other non-verbal behaviors, including eye gaze and prosody along with face, lip, and body movements, it is possible the beneficial effect of gesture is instead attributable to these other behaviors. We used a computer-generated animated pedagogical agent to control both verbal and non-verbal behavior. Children viewed lessons on mathematical equivalence in which an avatar either gestured or did not gesture, while eye gaze, head position, and lip movements remained identical across gesture conditions. Children who observed the gesturing avatar learned more, and they solved problems more quickly. Moreover, those children who learned were more likely to transfer and generalize their knowledge. These findings provide converging evidence that gesture facilitates math learning, and they reveal the potential for using technology to study non-verbal behavior in controlled experiments.

Embodied Learning: Why at School the Mind Needs the Body

“…Wagner (Cook et al, 2016) conducted a between-subjects study with 65 children (mean age 9 years) to investigate the effect of gesture learning on mathematical equation problems as “3 + 8 + 5 = 3 + 13.” The authors hypothesized that gestures would facilitate understanding of trained material and would promote transfer when children had to solve equations. In the study, an instructional avatar was employed in order to avoid confounding factors that can be created during live instruction delivered by a human.…”

Why Your Body Can Jog Your Mind

“…Cook et al (2016) made an avatar explain mathematical equivalence to school children with and without (beat and representational) gestures. In the gesture condition, children had better performance in problem solving than their peers in the non-gesture condition.…”

Non-verbal Enrichment in Vocabulary Learning With a Virtual Pedagogical Agent

“…Clarebout and Heidig, 2012;Schroeder et al, 2013;Johnson and Lester, 2016). Recently, however, the potential of the agent's non-verbal gestures to support the learning process has attracted notice in the domain of math education (e.g., Anasingaraju et al, 2016;Cook et al, 2017), and also for vocabulary learning (e.g., Bergmann and Macedonia, 2013). In fact, learning environments incorporating embodied agents provide a flexible way to support vocabulary learning with nonverbal enrichment-be it by gestures performed by the agent or by other means, such as pictures.…”