Analysis of Gesture

Previous work in other domains (e.g., conservation of quantity, Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986; math, Perry, Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1988) suggests that children's gestures can be uniquely informative. Gesture provides information about whether a child is ready to improve on a task, and also offers insight into the child's newest thoughts (Goldin-Meadow, 2003). Gesture thus provides a window onto learners' minds, a window that teachers can, and do, take advantage of. Teachers not only notice children's gestures but they often adjust their instruction (including their own gestures) in response to their students' gestures (Goldin-Meadow, Kim & Singer, 1999; Goldin-Meadow & Singer, 2003). When teachers use gesture in instruction, children learn, often better than when taught with speech alone (Singer & Goldin-Meadow, 2005).

Gesture has the potential to be a particularly powerful instructional tool in the spatial domain because it is inherently spatial, e.g., it is particularly good at capturing spatial characteristics of objects. Thus, for example, in teaching children about standards in measurement (see Strand 1), it could easily be used to "stand in" for a standard that is no longer in the immediate context. Gesture could be helpful in exploring when calculus students take their first steps in shifting from an early spatial model of continuity to the more sophisticated mode including limits (see Strand 2). As in other domains, students' gestures are likely to reveal spatial mappings not seen in their speech, and mismatches between gesture and speech may signal moments of potential conceptual change.

Given the potential importance of real or imagined motor manipulation in successful performance on spatial transformation problems, the analysis of the gestures people produce while explaining how they solve these problems may be particularly useful in revealing knowledge in transition. Indeed, we (Erlich, Levine & Goldin-Meadow, 2005) have recently found that producing gestures that capture the motion involved in a mental transformation is highly correlated with success after training on the mental transformation task. Interestingly, girls perform significantly less well on the mental transformation task, and they also produce significantly fewer motion gestures, than boys. Our future work will explore the effects of encouraging children, particularly girls, to gesture about motion, either by providing gestural models for children to copy during the instruction (e.g., Wagner & Goldin-Meadow, 2005) or by explicitly asking children to gesture along with their speech. In another collaborative project (Schaal, Uttal, Goldin-Meadow & Levine, 2005), we have found that, when asked to describe a space they have just walked through, adults are more likely to use both gesture and speech in their descriptions than 8- and 10-year-old children. Adults are also more likely to have a survey representation (i.e., a bird's eye view) of the space than children, who tend to have a route representation (i.e., a walk-through view) of the space. Moreover, adults who are asked not to use their hands (and hence do not gesture) have representations that are less survey-like in nature, indicating again that gesture may be particularly important in thinking about spatial relations among multiple locations. In future work, we will encourage children to describe space using gesture as well as speech in order to explore the effect that adding a gestural description to a child's repertoire has on the child's mental representations of the space.

Finally, we plan to compare the representations that learners display in their gestures to those displayed in their drawings (using CogSketch). Drawing and gesturing are both visual representations and thus ideally suited to capture spatial distinctions, but the formats have different properties. Drawings leave a trace, gestures do not. But gesture provides sequential information that static drawings do not offer. Since ink gathered in CogSketch will be time-stamped, we can easily investigate temporal aspects of sketching, and compare them to gesture, that would be difficult to do otherwise. Individuals may differ in how effective they find these two different types of representational tools and our future work will explore these differences. Moreover, different spatial problems may benefit differentially from the use of sketching and the use of gesture.

Point of Contact: Susan Goldin-Meadow

Relevant Background Publications

• Church, R. B., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1986). The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge. Cognition, 23, 43-71.
• Ehrlich, S. B., Levine, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. The importance of gesture in children's spatial reasoning. Developmental Psychology, in press.
• Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). Hearing gesture: How our hands help us think. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Goldin-Meadow, S., Kim, S., & Singer, M. (1999). What the teacher's hands tell the student's mind about math. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 720-730.
• Goldin-Meadow, S. & Singer, M. A. (2003). From children's hands to adults' ears: Gesture's role in teaching and learning. Developmental Psychology, 39, 509-520.
• Perry, M., Church, R. B., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1988). Transitional knowledge in the acquisition of concepts. Cognitive Development, 3, 359-400.
• Schaal, A., Uttal, D., Goldin-Meadow, S., & Levine, S. C. (2005, May). Children's gestures provide insight into their mental representation of space. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Psychological Association, Chicago.
• Singer, M. A., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Children learn when their teachers' gestures and speech differ. Psychological Science, 16, 85-89.
• Wagner, S.,M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). The role of gesture in learning: Do children use their hands to change their minds? Journal of Cognition and Development.