A case study to track teacher gestures and performance in a virtual learning environment

PubDate: March 2015

Teams: University of Central Florida

Writers: Roghayeh Barmaki；Charles E. Hughes

PDF: A case study to track teacher gestures and performance in a virtual learning environment

Abstract

As part of normal interpersonal communication, people send and receive messages with their body, especially with their hands. Gestures play an important role in teacher-student classroom interactions. In the domain of education, many research projects have focused on the study of such gestures either in real classrooms or in tutorial settings with experienced teachers. Novice teachers especially need to understand the messages they are sending through nonverbal communication as this can have a major effect on their ability to manage behaviors and deliver content. Such learning should optimally occur before experiencing the real classroom. To assist in this process, we have developed a virtual classroom environment- TeachLivE- and used it for teacher practice, reflection and assessment. This paper investigates the way teachers use gestures in the virtual classroom settings of TeachLivE. Biology and algebra teachers were evaluated in our study. Analysis of video recordings from real and virtual environment seems to indicate that algebra teachers gesture significantly more often than biology teachers. These results have implications for providing useful feedback to participant teachers.