Understanding conditions leading to student gestures during fractions lessons

Previous studies have shown that students’ gestures can support their learning, yet little is known about what might prompt students to use gestures while learning in mathematics classrooms. To address this, we observed the same fraction lesson, taught by 8 different teachers, in which we identified students’ mathematics-related gestures and traced back to how and who prompted the gestures. We also searched for all instances of these prompts within a 4-minute window, to assess the probability that those prompts led to student gestures. Logistic regressions indicated that students were likely to engage in gesturing when they spontaneously offered elaborations (without prompting), and after teachers’ higher-order prompts. We also found that students produced more concatenated gestures after teachers provided higher-order prompts (requesting strategies or rationale) than factual prompts (requesting facts or results of mathematical problems). This study provides new insights about the conditions that elicit students’ embodied mathematical thinking.