Title
The Role of Gestures in Learning Computer Sciences: (Abstract Only).
Abstract
Computer science teachers want to know what their students are and are not learning and understanding. Gestures, or spontaneous hand movements produced when talking, could help teachers understand what their students are thinking. During communication, gestures often reflect thoughts not expressed when people talk (Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005). Listeners can then extract meaningful information from the gestures they see. When learning computer science, gestures may be an external representation of students' understandings of code. In this research, we conducted a qualitative study observing and interviewing a high school CS class to understand how and when gestures were used. When students trace code, their gestures show how well they understand the code's execution. In another context when students described their code to the teacher or other students, the students' gestures showed how abstracted their knowledge was. Students who understood their code made more general gestures, while struggling students made pointing gestures for each line of their code. These findings suggest that teachers could use students' gestures as a formative assessment to understand how well their students are learning.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3159450.3162316
SIGCSE '18: The 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education Baltimore Maryland USA February, 2018
Keywords
Field
DocType
gesture,computer science education
Gesture,Computer science,Interview,Mathematics education,Qualitative research,Multimedia,Formative assessment
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5103-4
0
0.34
References 
Authors
1
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Amber Solomon133.21
Vedant Pradeep200.34
Sarah Li300.34
Mark Guzdial42274354.35