Research in Science Education: The Role of Gestures in Geoscience Teaching and Learning

摘要

If an instructor spreads his or her arms wide to convey through gesture the vastness of the solar system, do students carry away an enhanced sense of that vastness? Or does the gesture merely anchor the perceived scale of the described phenomenon more tightly to humans' default measurement tool, the human body, leaving a muddled perception that the universe is one armspan across? * Geoscientists use arcane spatial representations to illuminate and communicate specialized information, for example, "beachball" symbols for earthquake focal mechanisms, Mohr's circle for stress and strain, and Miller indices for crystal faces. Can use of gestures coupled with such representations break into this vicious cycle? * Kali and Orion (1996) documented that students who had the most difficulty interpreting geological block diagrams suffered from a specific failure mode: non-penetrative errors, in which they considered only the surface of the model.