Gesture analysis for physics education researchers

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1. D. McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992).
2. S. Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help us Think (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003).
3. A. Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 2004).
4. D. McNeill, Gesture and Thought (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005).
5. References [1–4], and references therein.
6. There are, however, numerous examples in which it is difficult to clearly delineate gestures and functional manipulation of objects—for example, gesturing with a pen in hand while occasionally marking a paper. See N. Smith, undergraduate thesis, Program in Cognitive Science, University of California at Berkeley, 2003; J. Wolfe, Gesture and collaborative planning: A case study of a student writing group, Written Communication 22, 298 (2005).
7. Reference [4], p. 7.
8. Reference [2], p. 5.
9. Reference [1], p. 149.
10. The gesture recalls the ancient theory attributing sight to “eidola,” beams that emanated from the eye. See Ref. [1], p. 157 for discussion of the appearance of eidola in gesture.
11. Reference [2], p. 3; D. Givry and W.-M. Roth, Toward a new conception of conceptions: Interplay of talk, gestures, and structures in the setting, J. Res. Sci. Teach. 43, 1086 (2006).
12. M. W. Alibali, M. Bassok, K. O. Solomon, S. E. Syc, and S. Goldin-Meadow, Illuminating mental representations through speech and gesture, Psychol. Sci. 10, 327 (1999).
13. Gesture research’s theoretical framework is addressed in depth especially in Refs. [3, 4] and is summarized more briefly in Refs. [16, 25, 29, 30] and others below.
14. The material in this section originally appeared in R. E. Scherr, in 2003 Physics Education Research Conference, edited by J. Marx, K. Cummings, and S. Franklin, AIP Conf. Proc. No. 720 (AIP, Melville, NY, 2004).
15. The gesture is also potentially generative of thinking as well as indicative; see Sec. 4 .
16. W.-M. Roth, From gesture to scientific language, Journal of Pragmatics 32, 1683 (2000); W.-M. Roth and M. Welzel, From activity to gestures and scientific language, J. Res. Sci. Teach. 38, 103 (2001).
17. See Ref. [16].
18. E. Crowder, Gestures at work in sense-making science talk, J. Learn. Sci. 5, 173 (1996).
19. J. Gerwing and J. Bavelas, Linguistic influences on gesture’s form, Gesture 4, 157 (2004).
20. E. Ochs, P. Gonzales, and S. Jacoby, in Interaction and Grammar, edited by E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff, and S. A. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1996), 328; L. A. Becvar, J. Hollan, and E. Hutchins, Hands as molecules: Representational gestures used for developing theory in a scientific laboratory, Semiotica 156, 89 (2005).
21. W.-M. Roth and D. Lawless, Scientific investigations, metaphorical gestures, and the emergence of abstract scientific concepts, Learn. Instr. 12, 285 (2002); see also Reference [2], Chap. 11.
22. S. Goldin-Meadow, H. Nusbaum, P. Garber, and R. B. Church, Explaining math: Gesturing lightens the load, Psychol. Sci. 12, 516 (2001).
23. R. M. Krauss, Y. Chen, and R. F. Gottesman, in Language and Gesture, edited by D. McNeill (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 2000), 261.
24. See first article in Ref. [16].
25. M. W. Alibali, S. Kita, and A. J. Young, Gesture and the process of speech production: We think, therefore we gesture, Lang. Cognit. Processes 15, 593 (2000).
26. A hypothesis regarding the role of gesture in activating “perceptual simulations” that promote understanding and retention is explored in Sec. 5 of D. L. Craig, N. J. Nersessian, and R. Catrambone, in Model-based Reasoning: Science, Technology, values, edited by L. Magnani and N. J. Nersessian (Kluwer Academic, New York, 2002), 167.
27. Reference [1], Chap. 11.
28. The act of holding the keys might be classified as a functional act on an object rather than a gesture, since it was not linked to speech, but see Ref. [6].
29. E. Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1995); E. Hutchins and L. Palen, in Discourse, Tools, and Reasoning: Essays on Situated Cognition, edited by L. B. Resnick, R. Saljo, C. Pontecorvo, and B. Burge (Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1997), 23.
30. M. Johnson, The Body in the Mind (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987); F. Varela, E. Rosch, and E. Thompson, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991); H. Clark, Using Language (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1997); R. Nunez, in Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention, and Emotion, edited by R. Núñez and W. J. Freeman (Imprint Academic, Thorverton, UK, 1999), 41; C. Goodwin, Action and embodiment within situated human interaction, Journal of Pragmatics 32, 1489 (2000).
31. See, for example, D. P. Maloney, Rule-governed approaches to physics: Newton’s third law, Phys. Educ. 19, 37 (1984); R. K. Boyle and D. P. Maloney, Effect of written text on usage of Newton’s third law, J. Res. Sci. Teach. 28, 123 (1991); D. Hestenes, M. Wells, and G. Swackhamer, Force concept inventory, Phys. Teach. 30, 141 (1992) [SPIN].
32. The instructional activity is described in detail in A. Elby, Helping physics students learn about learning, Am. J. Phys. Phys. Educ. Rsch. Supp. 69, S54 (2001).
33. References [1–4], and references therein.
34. Discussed extensively throughout Ref. [2].
35. R. Church and S. Goldin-Meadow, The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge, Cognition 23, 43 (1986) [CAS].
36. P. Garber and S. Goldin-Meadow, Gesture offers insight into problem-solving in adults and children, Cogn. Sci. 26, 817 (2002).
37. R. Church, Using gesture and speech to capture transitions in learning, Cognit. Dev. 14, 313 (1999).