Using Gesture Analysis to Assess Students’ Developing Representational Competence

Abstract

Assessments of representational competence traditionally take one of two formats: those that ask students to generate external representations and those that ask students to interpret a given representation. Using either format extant studies have focused primarily on assessing the quality of students' representational competence before and after instruction or analyzing how representational competence differs between experts and novices. This chapter will discuss a novel approach for assessing students' developing representational competence using a micro-genetic approach. Specifically, we illustrate how student-generated gestures hold unique affordances for assessing representational competence that compliment traditional pen and paper assessments. We demonstrate the application of this approach with a simple experiment that assesses student reasoning with multi-representational learning technologies. We show how the specificity (i.e. the informational properties) of different learning technologies influence students' developing representational competence as evident in the gestures that students produce before, during, and after interacting with a learning technology. We conclude by contrasting the distinct informational and computational properties of external representations depicted in inscriptions and those depicted in gesture.