Assessing knowledge conveyed in gesture: Do teachers have the upper hand?

Children's gestures can reveal important information about their problem-solving strategies. This study investigated whether the information children express only in gesture is accessible to adults not trained in gesture coding. Twenty teachers and 20 undergraduates viewed videotaped vignettes of 12 children explaining their solutions to equations. Six children expressed the same strategy in speech and gesture, and 6 expressed different strategies. After each vignette, adults described the child's reasoning. For children who expressed different strategies in speech and gesture, both teachers and undergraduates frequently described strategies that children had not expressed in speech. These additional strategies could often be traced to the children's gestures. Sensitivity to gesture was comparable for teachers and undergraduates. Thus, even without training, adults glean information, not only from children's words but also from their hands

Editorial: An open book: what and how young children learn from picture and story books

Looking at and listening to picture and story books is a ubiquitous activity, frequently enjoyed by many young children and their parents. Well before children can read for themselves they are able to learn from books. Looking at and listening to books increases children's general knowledge, understanding about the world, and promotes language acquisition. This collection of papers demonstrates the breadth of information pre-reading children learn from books and increases our understanding of the social and cognitive mechanisms that support this learning. Our hope is that this Research Topic/eBook will be useful for researchers as well as educational practitioners and parents who are interested in optimizing children's learning. We conceptually divide this research topic into four broad sections, which focus on the nature and attributes of picture and story books, what children learn from picture and story books, the interactions children experience during shared reading, and potential applications of research into shared reading, respectively

An Evolutionary Upgrade of Cognitive Load Theory: Using the Human Motor System and Collaboration to Support the Learning of Complex Cognitive Tasks

Cognitive load theory is intended to provide instructional strategies derived from experimental, cognitive load effects. Each effect is based on our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, primarily the limited capacity and duration of a human working memory. These limitations are ameliorated by changes in long-term memory associated with learning. Initially, cognitive load theory's view of human cognitive architecture was assumed to apply to all categories of information. Based on Geary's (Educational Psychologist 43, 179-195 2008; 2011) evolutionary account of educational psychology, this interpretation of human cognitive architecture requires amendment. Working memory limitations may be critical only when acquiring novel information based on culturally important knowledge that we have not specifically evolved to acquire. Cultural knowledge is known as biologically secondary information. Working memory limitations may have reduced significance when acquiring novel

Learning to Represent Mathematics: The Negotiation of Meanings of Mathematical Symbols in First Grade

95 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.Instructional moments are not all created equal. This project documented the characteristics of a class of events ("teachable moments") that may have particular power in affecting student learning. To investigate students' acquisition of mathematical representation, I examined teacher-student discourse in 45 first-grade lessons, focusing on episodes of teachable moments: errors, confusion, disagreements, and spontaneous contributions. In the lessons errors and confusion occurred most often. Teachers responded to errors and confusion by increasing their use of multiple representations, more often than prior to them. Teachers especially responded to errors with reference to written symbols, and they responded to confusion with concrete manipulatives. Students referenced visual forms at a low rate overall but did so more during errors than confusion and received explicit encouragement to reference visual forms more prior to errors than confusion. Few mathematical disagreements occurred. The rate of spontaneous contributions varied greatly by classroom, but representational processes did not vary significantly during those episodes. These results provide evidence for the role of multiple representations of mathematical ideas during key instructional moments.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Learning to Represent Mathematics: The Negotiation of Meanings of Mathematical Symbols in First Grade

95 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.Instructional moments are not all created equal. This project documented the characteristics of a class of events ("teachable moments") that may have particular power in affecting student learning. To investigate students' acquisition of mathematical representation, I examined teacher-student discourse in 45 first-grade lessons, focusing on episodes of teachable moments: errors, confusion, disagreements, and spontaneous contributions. In the lessons errors and confusion occurred most often. Teachers responded to errors and confusion by increasing their use of multiple representations, more often than prior to them. Teachers especially responded to errors with reference to written symbols, and they responded to confusion with concrete manipulatives. Students referenced visual forms at a low rate overall but did so more during errors than confusion and received explicit encouragement to reference visual forms more prior to errors than confusion. Few mathematical disagreements occurred. The rate of spontaneous contributions varied greatly by classroom, but representational processes did not vary significantly during those episodes. These results provide evidence for the role of multiple representations of mathematical ideas during key instructional moments.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD