The Impact of Gesturing when Learning to Play Piano Clips from Animations
Creators: name: Ayres, P
name: Mierowsky, R
name: Marcus, N
Publisher: name: UNSW Sydney
Year: 2016

description: This study aimed to investigate the impact of gesturing when learning from instructional animations. Theoretical considerations derived from embodied cognition (Glenberg, 2008) and cognitive load theory (Sweller, Ayres, &amp; Kalyuga, 2011) underpinned the study. A second aim of the study was to investigate whether the expected positive effects of gesturing were subject to the expertise reversal effect (see Sweller et al., 2003). A musical task (playing the piano) was chosen because it met two important criteria. Playing the piano is a form of human movement that requires the use of hands, and therefore was expected to be particularly suited to learning from animated presentations. Playing the piano can be mimicked using the hands and therefore was expected to particularly suited to gesturing. Two hypotheses were tested: 1: Gesturing would lead to greater learning than non-gesturing 2: There would be an interaction between gesturing and expertise Method and procedure Fifty university students from an Australian University were assigned randomly to one of two gesturing conditions in a 2 (gesturing vs. non-gesturing) x 2 (novice vs. more experience) factorial design. The learning materials consisted of a series of four piano clips of increasing difficulty. Each clip showed the hands of a musician playing the musical extracts, and in perfect synchronization the sounds made by the piano were heard. Participants viewed each animation clip individually twice and after each clip were asked to play the musical piece on a piano. The gesturing group were required to make gestures when viewing the animations, and the non-gesturing group were not. Results For clips 2 [p &lt; .001] and 3 [p &lt; .01] the gesturing group had significantly higher scores than the non-gesturing group. Furthermore, the gesturing group experienced significantly less difficulty than the non-gesturing group on for clips 1 [p &lt; .01], 2[p &lt; .001], and 3[p &lt; .001]. These results provide support for Hypothesis 1, as when gesturing participants scored higher and experienced less difficulty. For clip1 only, a significant interaction was found [p &lt; .05]. Simple effects tests indicated that for the novice group, gesturing led to significant higher scores than non-gesturing (p &lt; .05). However, for the more experienced group no significant difference was found. Hence, the only support for hypothesis 2 was found on clip 1. However, for the novice group a significant advantage for gesturing was found on clips 1 (p &lt; .05) and 2 (p &lt; .01), but not for clips 3 and 4. For the more experienced group, there was a significant gesturing advantage for clips 2 (p &lt; .01) and 3 (p &lt; .05) but not for clips 1 &amp; 4. These results suggest that as the tasks got more difficult gesturing lost its advantage. Conclusion It can be concluded that the effectiveness of the gestures was moderated by both task complexity, where gestures were most useful for tasks that were of a moderate level of difficulty, and expertise, where more expert piano players found gestures to be redundant for the easier clips, and more useful for the harder clips, while novices found the gestures to be useful for the easier clips, but not for the more difficult ones. References Glenberg, A. M. (2008). Embodiment for education. In P. Calvo &amp; A. Gomila (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive science: An embodied approach (pp. 355–372). Elsevier: Amsterdam. Sweller, J., Ayres, P., &amp; Kalyuga, S. (2011). Cognitive load theory. New York, NY: Springer.
description: The 9th International Cognitive Load Theory Conference; Bochum, Germany; 2016-06-22 - 2016-06-24