Gestures and bodily actions lighten cognitive load and extend mathematical ideas across group members during collaboration¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2021 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Bodily actions such as gestures act as material scaffolding that affords distribution of cognition across modalities, lightens cognitive load, and allows collaborative extension of mathematical ideas over multiple bodies. → Juliene Madureira Ferreira 2021

Evidence¶

Juliene Madureira Ferreira 2021¶

Juliene Madureira Ferreira. (2021). What If We Look at the Body? An Embodied Perspective of Collaborative Learning. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09607-8

q2 · i? · review · r2

The review attributes, citing Goldin-Meadow and colleagues and Roth's review, the claim that gestures facilitate conservation of cognitive resources to improve explanation-task performance. It also reports Walkington et al. (2019) finding learners use collaborative gestures to extend mathematical reasoning across group members.

"studies argue that such bodily actions carry a property of material scaffolding, as it affords a distribution of cognition across different modalities (for a review see Roth, 2003), lightning cognitive load (Goldin-Meadow et al., 2001)"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Body movements and positions focusing on virtual objects, and shifts away from or around them, signal key interactional collaborative events in shared VR — related
• A systematic review argues that concrete materials aid mathematics and science learning when they are explicitly and gradually connected to the abstract symbols they represent — related
• Young children collaboratively develop their own gestures to represent and explain challenging science concepts in a mixed-reality environment — related
• Much bodily-material coordination in touchscreen collaboration occurs in the space off the screen — related
• Collaborative speech strongly co-occurs with actions on virtual objects and virtual hand gestures in shared VR geometry tasks — related
• Gesturing during learning improves retention and reduces cognitive load — related
• Enacting support—gestures and manipulatives—facilitates explanation quality and problem-solving, partly by adding strategies to verbal explanations — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Gesturing while explaining problem solving reduces cognitive load — a narrower finding that bears on this claim