Ruth Breckinridge Church

• PhD
• Northeastern Illinois University

When gestures occur with speech during math instruction, learning outcomes improve, indicating that gesture has the potential to mitigate educational inequities. One population that could benefit from an instructional tool like gesture is English Language Learners (ELLs). To increase our understanding of gesture’s potential benefits for math learni...

During mathematics instruction, teachers often make links between different representations of mathematical information, and they sometimes use gestures to refer to the representations that they link. In this research, we investigated the role of such gestures in students’ learning from lessons about links between linear equations and corresponding...

Co-speech gestures are ubiquitous: when people speak, they almost always produce gestures. Gestures reflect content in the mind of the speaker, often under the radar and frequently using rich mental images that complement speech. What are gestures doing? Why do we use them? This book is the first to systematically explore the functions of gesture i...

Co-speech gestures are ubiquitous: when people speak, they almost always produce gestures. Gestures reflect content in the mind of the speaker, often under the radar and frequently using rich mental images that complement speech. What are gestures doing? Why do we use them? This book is the first to systematically explore the functions of gesture i...

Previous studies have shown that teachers’ gestures are beneficial for student learning. In this research, we investigate whether teachers’ gestures have comparable effects in face-to-face live instruction and video-based instruction. We provided sixty-three 7–10 year old students with instruction about mathematical equivalence problems (e.g., 3 +...

Recent research has demonstrated instruction that includes gesture can greatly impact the learning of certain mathematics tasks for children and much of this work relies on face-to-face instruction. We extend the work on this problem by asking how gesture in instruction impacts adult learning from a video production for a science concept. Borrowing...

This research investigated how teachers express links between ideas in speech, gestures, and other modalities in middle school mathematics instruction. We videotaped 18 lessons (3 from each of 6 teachers), and within each, we identified linking episodes—segments of discourse in which the teacher connected mathematical ideas. For each link, we ident...

Teachers’ gestures are an integral part of their instructional communication. In this study, we provided a teacher with a tutorial about ways to use gesture in connecting ideas in mathematics instruction, and we asked the teacher to teach sample lessons about slope and intercept before and after this tutorial. In response to the tutorial, the teach...

Researchers have theorised that speech and gesture are integrated in communication. We ask whether this integrated relationship is indexed by a unique temporal link between speech and gesture. University students performed videotaped tasks that elicited: (1) speech and action descriptions about how to act on objects and (2) speech and gesture descr...

Abstract This research focused on how teachers establish and maintain shared understanding with students during classroom mathematics instruction. We studied the microlevel interventions that teachers implement spontaneously as a lesson unfolds, which we call micro-interventions. In particular, we focused on teachers’ micro-interventions around tro...

This study asked whether: (1) adults process representational gesture and (2) gesture is remembered over time. Forty-five college students (ages 22-38) were each randomly assigned to watch a set of Speech Only and Speech + Gesture video stimuli (containing statements that were extracted from social conversation) either in an immediate or delayed co...

Studies investigating the role gesture plays in communication claim gesture has a minimal role, while others claim that gesture carries a large communicative load. In these studies, however, the role of gesture has been assessed in a context where speech is understood and could easily carry the entire communicative burden. We examine the role of ge...

Two experiments examined how 7- and 8-year-old children, 9- and 10-year-old children, and adults process mismatched, task-related speech and gesture differently as a function of development. Participants watched videotapes of children speaking and gesturing about the concept of conservation. Using a recognition paradigm, we assessed immediate memor...

Most theories of pragmatics take as the basic unit of communication the verbal content of spoken or written utterances. However, many of these theories have overlooked the fact that important information about an utterance's meaning can be conveyed nonverbally. In the present study, we investigate the pragmatic role that hand gestures play in langu...

The present study compared 3 measures of knowledge variability to determine which measure predicts learning. Eighty-six children between the ages of 5 and 8 years participated in a pretest-training–posttest study of conservation understanding. Gesture-speech mismatches predicted learning better than both an across-task measure and a within-task mea...

The present study compares children's and adults' ability to detect information that is conveyed through representational hand gestures. Eighteen children (M = 10 years, 1 month) and 18 college undergraduates watched videotaped stimuli of children verbally and gesturally explaining their reasoning in a problem-solving situation. A recall procedure...

The present study compares children's and adults' ability to detect information that is conveyed through representational hand gestures. Eighteen children (M= 10 years, 1 month) and 18 college undergraduates watched videotaped stimuli of children verbally and gesturally explaining their reasoning in a problem-solving situation. A recall procedure w...

Research suggests that children produce nonverbal behaviors when interacting with adults and peers. This study investigates how well other children can detect 1 specific type of nonverbal behavior: representational gestures. Eighteen children (12 Caucasian girls and 6 Caucasian boys; M = 7 years, 11 months) watched videotaped stimuli of children ve...

Thoughts conveyed through gesture often differ from thoughts conveyed through speech. In this article, a model of the sources and consequences of such gesture-speech mismatches and their role during transitional periods in the acquisition of concepts is proposed. The model makes 2 major claims: (a) The transitional state is the source of gesture-sp...

Thoughts conveyed through gesture often differ from thoughts conveyed through speech. In this article, a model of the sources and consequences of such gesture–speech mismatches and their role during transitional periods in the acquisition of concepts is proposed. The model makes 2 major claims: (a) The transitional state is the source of gesture–sp...

Children in transition with respect to a concept, when asked to explain that concept, often convey one strategy in speech and a different one in gesture. Are both strategies activated when that child solves problems instantiating the concept? While solving a math task, discordant children (who produced different strategies in gesture and speech on...

Children in transition with respect to a concept, when asked to explain that concept, often convey one strategy in speech and a different one in gesture. Are both strategies activated when that child solves problems instantiating the concept? While solving a math task, discordant children (who produced different strategies in gesture and speech on...

When asked to explain their beliefs about a concept, some children produce gestures that convey different information from the information conveyed in their speech (i.e., gesture-speech mismatches). Moreover, it is precisely the children who produce a large proportion of gesture-speech mismatches in their explanations of a concept who are particula...

These studies explore children's conceptual knowledge as it is expressed through their verbal and gestural explanations of concepts. We build on previous work that has shown that children who produce a large proportion of gestures that do not match their verbal explanations are in transition with respect to the concept they are explaining. This ges...

This study investigates two implications of frequent mismatches between gesture and speech in a child's explanations of a concept: (1) Do gesture/speech mismatches reflect a basic inconsistency in the explanatory system which underlies a child's understanding of a concept? (2) Do gesture/speech mismatches, perhaps as a consequence of this inconsist...