PROCEEDINGS OF THE 21ST ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2018
San Diego, California
Gestures as Evidence of Assimilation When Learning Optimization
Page: 924
Teachers and students often produce gestures during communication about mathematical concepts and processes. Our goal in this study was to determine whether students would produce gestures similar to those used by the teacher. Each of five students in a first semester calculus course was asked to solve two optimization problems based on a video lesson in which the teacher used primarily pointing, primarily depictive gestures, or no gestures at all. Though our data do not show the students’ gestures directly imitating the teacher’s, they provide support for the claim that frequent gesture use during communication may indicate assimilation of new concepts and that assimilation improves student performance on optimization tasks.