How teachers use a student’s gesture as a diagnostic tool

International audienceWhen students speak about material objects they have at hand, it has been proposed that their metaphorical gestures (gestures narrative in character relating to abstractions) of conceptual and abstract entities are facilitated (Roth & Lawless, 2002). Gesturing, favored by the presence of artifacts is thus seen as scaffolding the emergence of scientifi c language. Other research has illustrated the notion of gesture and speech mismatch (gesture conveying different information than that conveyed in speech) as being suggestive of receptiveness to learning (Garber, Alibali & Goldin-Meadow, 1998). When learners are acquiring a concept, Alibali & Goldin-Meadow, (1993) suggest that they progress from a stable state in which they produce incorrect gesture-speech matches, through an unstable state where they produce gesture-speech mismatches (perhaps signaling two different problem-solving strategies) and fi nally to a stable state where they produce correct gesture-speech matches. It is during this unstable state that a learner may be seen as in the process of acquiring a particular concept and more likely to benefi t from instruction. But do teachers interpret students’ gestures and use them to diagnose students’ conceptions ? Alibali, Flevares & Goldin-Meadow, (1997) have shown that when teachers describe fourth grade students’ problem solving strategies of mathematics equations, these descriptions (be they gestural themselves or verbalized) can indeed be traced to students’ gesture. However, with one or two possible exceptions, teachers did not explicitly cite gestures as reasons to assess students in the way they did and therefore decoded gestural content into verbal or verbal/gestural assessment in an unconscious way (Alibali, personal communication). In this proposed communication, we show how two French high school physics teachers in training - through their talk and gesture - analyze the recorded and transcribed verbal and gestural activity of a student’s problem solving to assess his physics knowledge (Lund, 2003). They explicitly cite his gesture as evidence for his confusion of the concepts of speed and movement. Implications are drawn for wider use of student gesture analysis in teacher education