Learning vector addition using concreteness fading: the role of gesture production

This paper presents a vector addition learning intervention by incorporating concreteness fading to explore how students use gestures to establish common ground and how their gestures reflect their transitional state of understanding vector addition. Sixteen eighth-graders from a charter school in a large U.S. Midwestern city were recruited to participate in the intervention. We conducted a focused video analysis to observe two students’ use of gestures in two conditions, concreteness fading and concreteness introduction (learning activities in reverse order). We found that students tended to use gesture to create common ground for effective group communication and shared understanding. Also, observing gestures can reveal learners’ transitional states, in which they may have multiple and diverse hypotheses. This study exemplifies how to understand learning in a concreteness fading intervention through gesture analysis and reveals how common ground and transitional knowledge emerge in a concreteness fading intervention.