"Show me" what you mean: Learning and design implications of eliciting gesture in student explanations

This paper describes preliminary research conducted on how gestures affect the construction of student explanations of science phenomena. We examine the effect of asking middle school students to "show me" while they construct explanations of critical science topics such as heat transfer and the causes of seasons. Specifically we were interested in whether there were any apparent changes in students' inclusion of unobservable causal mechanisms (e.g., molecular interactions) that underlie observable phenomena such as how heat moves through a metal spoon. T o und erst and the see ffects, we coded for whet her explanations were more mechanistic following the "show me" prompts compared to their previous explanations. Results showed that elicitation of gesturing frequently led to increased attention to, and specification of, the critical mechanisms. We describe a few specific cases to illustrate the ways in which gesturing appeared to alter student reasoning.