The Role of Gestures in Learning Computer Sciences: (Abstract Only).

Computer science teachers want to know what their students are and are not learning and understanding. Gestures, or spontaneous hand movements produced when talking, could help teachers understand what their students are thinking. During communication, gestures often reflect thoughts not expressed when people talk (Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005). Listeners can then extract meaningful information from the gestures they see. When learning computer science, gestures may be an external representation of students' understandings of code. In this research, we conducted a qualitative study observing and interviewing a high school CS class to understand how and when gestures were used. When students trace code, their gestures show how well they understand the code's execution. In another context when students described their code to the teacher or other students, the students' gestures showed how abstracted their knowledge was. Students who understood their code made more general gestures, while struggling students made pointing gestures for each line of their code. These findings suggest that teachers could use students' gestures as a formative assessment to understand how well their students are learning.