Thinking with the Body: Conceptual Integration Through Gesture in Multiviewpoint Model Construction

Abstract:     

Educational researchers in STEM have recently come to recognize the value of teaching students to construct, critique, revise, and apply models. In this article, we contribute to existing research on students’ model-based reasoning with a fine-grained look at the interaction between two modeling resources: spatial reasoning and the body. How students drift between different gestural viewpoints while still maintaining spatiotemporal continuity in the model — and what implications this has for learning outcomes — are our core concerns in this chapter. Results suggest that gestural acts, in generating complex patterns in space and time, provide a dynamic scaffolding for conceptual development. In the gesture stream, students can both feel the actions of model components and track how those actions relate geographically and temporally to prior and subsequent events in the modeled system.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 19

Keywords: modeling, viewpoint, gesture, spatial reasoning