RESUMO
Understanding normal probability distributions is a crucial objective in mathematics and statistics education. Drawing upon cognitive psychology research, this study explores the use of drawings and visualizations as effective scaffolds to enhance students' comprehension. Although much research has documented the helpfulness of drawing as a research tool to reveal students' knowledge states, its direct utility in advancing higher-order cognitive processes remains understudied. In Study 1, qualitative methods were utilized to identify common misunderstandings among students regarding canonical depictions of the normal probability distribution. Building on these insights, Study 2 experimentally compared three instructional videos (static slides, dynamic drawing, and dynamic drawings done by a visible hand). The hand drawing video led to better learning than the other versions. Study 3 examined whether the benefits from observing a hand drawing could be reproduced by a dynamic cursor moving around otherwise static slides (without the presence of a hand). Results showed no significant learning difference between observing a hand drawing and a moving cursor, both outperforming a control. This research links the cognitive process of drawing with its educational role and provides insights into its potential to enhance memory, cognition, and inform instructional methods.
RESUMO
Public speakers like politicians carefully craft their words to maximize the clarity, impact, and persuasiveness of their messages. However, these messages can be shaped by more than words. Gestures play an important role in how spoken arguments are perceived, conceptualized, and remembered by audiences. Studies of political speech have explored the ways spoken arguments are used to persuade audiences and cue applause. Studies of politicians' gestures have explored the ways politicians illustrate different concepts with their hands, but have not focused on gesture's potential as a tool of persuasion. Our paper combines these traditions to ask first, how politicians gesture when using spoken rhetorical devices aimed at persuading audiences, and second, whether these gestures influence the ways their arguments are perceived. Study 1 examined two rhetorical devices-contrasts and lists-used by three politicians during U.S. presidential debates and asked whether the gestures produced during contrasts and lists differ. Gestures produced during contrasts were more likely to involve changes in hand location, and gestures produced during lists were more likely to involve changes in trajectory. Study 2 used footage from the same debates in an experiment to ask whether gesture influenced the way people perceived the politicians' arguments. When participants had access to gestural information, they perceived contrasted items as more different from one another and listed items as more similar to one another than they did when they only had access to speech. This was true even when participants had access to only gesture (in muted videos). We conclude that gesture is effective at communicating concepts of similarity and difference and that politicians (and likely other speakers) take advantage of gesture's persuasive potential.
Assuntos
Gestos , Fala , Humanos , Idioma , Desenvolvimento da Linguagem , MãosRESUMO
This article explores the role of sensorimotor engagement in students' learning of a challenging science, technology, engineering, and math-related concept. Previous research has failed to distinguish two features commonly associated with embodiment: sensorimotor engagement and visuospatial concreteness. In the current research, we ask whether sensorimotor engagement-operationalized as watching a video of hands manipulating paper representations-offers unique benefits beyond the visuospatial concreteness of a dynamic visualization of the same process. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions to learn about the shuffle() function in R: a Watch Hands Moving Objects group, which watched a video with hands; a Watch Moving Objects group, which watched a video with a dynamic visualization in which objects moved without hands; or a control group, which watched a live-coding video that did not include either hands or visuospatial representations. Results revealed that only participants in the Watch Hands Moving Objects group demonstrated significantly superior performance compared with both the Watch Moving Objects group and control groups. These findings highlight the unique benefit of sensorimotor engagement for learning, contributing to a deeper understanding of how embodiment can enhance the learning process. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
RESUMO
Using multiple representations is an important part of learning and problem-solving in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. For students to acquire flexible knowledge of representations, they must attend to the structural information within each representation and practice making relational connections between representations. Most studies so far have only attempted to help students connect between multiple representations in the lab or short-term classroom interventions, with the intervention largely separated from students' authentic learning. The present study developed a representation-mapping intervention designed to help students interpret, coordinate, and eventually translate across multiple representations. We integrated the intervention into an online textbook being used in a college course, allowing us to study its impact in a real course over an extended period of time. The findings of this study support the efficacy of the representation-mapping intervention for facilitating learning and shed light on how to implement and refine such interventions in authentic learning contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
RESUMO
Producing content-related gestures has been found to impact students' learning, whether such gestures are spontaneously generated by the learner in the course of problem-solving, or participants are instructed to pose based on experimenter instructions during problem-solving and word learning. Few studies, however, have investigated the effect of (a) performing instructed gestures while learning concepts or (b) producing gestures without there being an implied connection between the gestures and the concepts being learned. The two studies reported here investigate the impact of instructed hand movements on students' subsequent understanding of a concept. Students were asked to watch an instructional video-focused on the concept of statistical model-three times. Two experimental groups were given a secondary task to perform while watching the video, which involved moving their hands to mimic the placement and orientation of red rectangular bars overlaid on the video. Students were told that the focus of the study was multitasking, and that the instructed hand movements were unrelated to the material being learned. In the content-match group the placement of the hands reinforced the concept being explained, and in the content-mismatch group it did not. A control group was not asked to perform a secondary task. In both studies, findings indicate that students in the content-match group performed better on the posttest, and showed less variation in performance, than did students in the content-mismatch group, with control students falling in between. Instructed hand movement-even when presented as an unrelated, secondary task-can affect students' learning of a complex concept.