PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2014
Denver, Colorado
Do Experts and Novices Gesture Differently?
Page: 663
Previous gesture studies conjecture that as individuals develop expertise in a field of mathematics their gestures tend to become more metaphoric, iconic, and dynamic. In this mixed-methods study, we compared the gestures of six experts and four pairs of novices as they geometrically described the complex number arithmetic operations z+w, zw, and 1/z. An ANOVA revealed that the factors Task and Gesture were statistically significant, but there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups’ gesture use. A Hierarchical Cluster Analysis directed the qualitative analysis where we found that novices exposed to technology appeared to produce gestures that were innovative or similar to the experts’ gestures. These findings suggest that facilitating students’ awareness of their own and the instructors’ gestures as well as exposing students to technology may help them develop more dynamic gestures and in turn possibly facilitate a more geometric perspective of the arithmetic of complex numbers.