How do Teacher's Gestures Affect Students' (Girls) Visual Attention During the Mathematical Discourse?

Abstract

Engaging with students and building rapport is critical in order for teachers to teach classes, communicate core concepts and emotionally connect with their students in regard to the cultural dynamism that occurs in the classrooms through its dialogic approach. This paper reports a study that was conducted in an upper primary school in Santiago, Chile, where a sample of 33 randomly selected female students wore a mini video camera mounted on eyeglass in their mathematics lessons. Using Google Images, we automatically and objectively looked form frames from the recordings where the classroom teacher appeared in the students' visual field. The results show that students significantly paid more visual attention in their mathematics lessons when the teachers' discourse was accompanied by gestures. In addition, there were differences between high and low achieving girls and how they were visually engaged during teachers' instructional information at different times of the lesson. Furthermore, there were differences between how introverts and extroverts were visually engaged while the teacher was gesturing. The findings of this study will have broad significance for building rapport and improving professional teaching practices.