Paying Attention to Gesture when Students Talk Chemistry: Interactional Resources for Responsive Teaching

Abstract

When students share and explore chemistry ideas with others, they use gestures and their bodies to perform their understanding. As a publicly visible, spatio−dynamic medium of expression, gestures and the body provide productive resources for imagining the submicroscopic, three-dimensional, and dynamic phenomena of chemistry together. In this paper, we analyze the role of gestures and the body as interactional resources in interactive spaces for collaborative meaning-making in chemistry. With our moment-by-moment analysis of video-recorded interviews, we demonstrate how creating spaces for, attending to, and interacting with students' gestures and bodily performances generate opportunities for learning. Implications for teaching and assessment that are responsive to students' ideas in chemistry are discussed.

Mathematical actions as procedural resources: An example from the separation of variables

“…We have suggested two. First, if we consider mathematical actions as a kind of thought, we raise questions about the nature of knowledge in a social and material context, a topic we have discussed previously [39,53,54]. Second, an awareness of the variability in students' mathematical thinking is an essential element of advanced physics instruction.…”

Multimodal Revoicing as an Interactional Mechanism for Connecting Scientific and Everyday Concepts

“…Revoicing occurs in many educational contexts (from kindergarten [Yifat & Zadunaisky-Ehrlich, 2008] to undergraduates [Flood et al, 2015]) and across a wide variety of subjects (from mathematics [Krussel & Edwards, 2004] and science [e.g., Ruiz-Primo & Furtak, 2007] to second-language learning [e.g., Park, 2013] and liberal arts seminars [Parsons, 2017]). Scholars argue that revoicing is pedagogically advantageous because it can (a) promote deeper full-class exploration of student-generated ideas [Forman & Ansell, 2002], (b) highlight particular elements of student ideas while backgrounding other elements [Nam, Ju, Rasmussen, Marrongelle, & Park, 2008], (c) extend and reshape the content of student contributions to resemble disciplinarily normative concepts [Eckert & Nilsson, 2017], (d) help students adopt disciplinarily normative language and representations [Forman & Larreamendy-Joerns, 1998], and (e) promote participation by explicitly valuing and soliciting student contributions [Strom, Kemeny, Lehrer, & Forman, 2001].…”

Exploring Emergent Features of Student Interaction within an Embodied Science Learning Simulation

“…Guided by the recent emphasis on the examination of multimodal interactions (e.g., Birchfield et al [25], Flood et al [27], Pogue & Ahyun [33]), we initially observed the selected videos in order to characterize the types of multimodality that students experience in the embodied learning environment; that is, verbal and non-verbal interactions.…”

“…Multimodal instruction emphasizes the value of effectively integrating representations of content across multiple sensory modalities to facilitate understanding and discourse [25][26][27][28]. These modalities can take on many forms, and while classification varies, Prain and Waldrip [29] provided a broad framework: descriptive (verbal, graphic, tabular), experimental, mathematical, figurative (pictorial, analogous, or metaphoric), and kinesthetic (gestural).…”

“…Multimodal sense-making through the creation of complex representations has also been shown to enhance learning [27]. Comparative work by Ainsworth and Loizou [37] and Ainsworth and Iacovides [38] found increased learning gains when students were asked to self-explain a concept while transferring across modalities (e.g., drawing a diagram based on text or writing a text based on a diagram).…”