From Activity to Gestures and Scientific Language

Gestures may provide the long sought-for bridge between laboratory experiences in science and scientific discourse about abstract entities. In this article, we present our results of analyzing students’ gestures and scientific discourse by supporting three assertions about the relationship between laboratory experiences, gestures, and scientific discourse. Gestures arise from the experiences in the phenomenal world, they most frequently express scientific content before students master discourse, they allow students to construct complex explanations by lowering the cognitive load; they provide a medium on which the development of scientific discourse can piggyback; and they provide the material that glues layers of phenomenally-accessible and abstract concepts. Our work has important implications for laboratory experiments which students should attempt to explain while still in the lab rather than afterwards and away from the materials.