Abstract
Many studies have demonstrated that meaningful gestures, such as the iconic and the metaphoric, may considerably assist students’ comprehension and enhance their learning engagement. Additionally, virtual lecturers have positively influenced students' online learning experiences. Yet, there seems to be no concrete evidence of how students recognize these gestures. Investigating the comprehension of lecturers' natural gestures from the perspective of students has the potential to inform the creation of embodied gestural pedagogical agents (PA). This paper conducted empirical studies investigating how students recognized and interpreted lectures’ gestures in real-life design classes. By analysing four sets of paired cases, which consist of observations and semi-structured interviews, we propose a matching model which illustrates the nonverbal communication between lecturers and students. Our result shows that the meanings of lecturers’ common meaningful gestures and the students’ knowledge of the gestures are relevantly equivalent. Yet, a substantial misunderstanding exists between the lecturers’ specific gestures and students’ comprehension. The research explores gesture-meaning matching patterns for multimodal communication, which is promising to help create a student-centred gestural PA design.
Keywords
gesture, pedagogical agent, embodied learning, empirical study
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.115
Citation
Wei, L.,and Chow, K.K.(2023) How students perceive lecturers' gestures? An exploration in gesture-meaning matching toward embodied pedagogical agent design, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, 9-13 October, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.115
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How students perceive lecturers' gestures? An exploration in gesture-meaning matching toward embodied pedagogical agent design
Many studies have demonstrated that meaningful gestures, such as the iconic and the metaphoric, may considerably assist students’ comprehension and enhance their learning engagement. Additionally, virtual lecturers have positively influenced students' online learning experiences. Yet, there seems to be no concrete evidence of how students recognize these gestures. Investigating the comprehension of lecturers' natural gestures from the perspective of students has the potential to inform the creation of embodied gestural pedagogical agents (PA). This paper conducted empirical studies investigating how students recognized and interpreted lectures’ gestures in real-life design classes. By analysing four sets of paired cases, which consist of observations and semi-structured interviews, we propose a matching model which illustrates the nonverbal communication between lecturers and students. Our result shows that the meanings of lecturers’ common meaningful gestures and the students’ knowledge of the gestures are relevantly equivalent. Yet, a substantial misunderstanding exists between the lecturers’ specific gestures and students’ comprehension. The research explores gesture-meaning matching patterns for multimodal communication, which is promising to help create a student-centred gestural PA design.