A computer science teacher asks a question, and when students don’t answer, she provides a gestured cue that demonstrates the procedure for finding the answer.
Gestured cues:
Representational gestures can provide different kinds of cues about how to answer questions, creating adjustable levels of support for students when they are participating in questioning sequences.
Teachers use gestured cues in three ways:
- product-cuing: the gesture provides information about the answer itself
- method-cuing: the gesture provides information about the procedure for finding the answer
- format-cuing: the gesture provides information about the format of the answer being sought (e.g., an ordered pair)
Teachers responsively adjust how they ask questions and include gestured cues depending on the level and type of confusion students display.
Flood, V. J. (2021). The secret multimodal life of IREs: Looking more closely at representational gestures in a familiar questioning sequence. Linguistics and Education, 63, 100913. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2021.100913