Michelle Perry
Professor of Educational Psychology
Dept. of Educational Psyschology
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
Gesture production is typically spontaneous, unconscious, and pervasive in both formal (e.g., instructional) and informal (e.g., conversational) contexts. Although a rich body of research has documented that learners’ gestures give us insight into their conceptual understanding, recent work suggests that the gestures that teachers produce can have significant effects on students’ learning. Toward this end, I have conducted several investigations that have targeted the teachers’ gestures and their impact on student learning. This work makes it clear that learning is affected by teachers’ gestures and, critically, when these gestures are absent, learning is significantly less likely to take place. Besides my investigations, I will also describe the work of other researchers that speaks directly to the importance of teachers’ gestures and will theorize about why gestures might be implicated as important in all teaching-and-learning contexts. From this point, I will ask: what can we learn from the work on gesture to support learning from pedagogical agents?
Bio
Michelle Perry is full professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to the University of Illinois, she served on the faculty at the University of Michigan in both Developmental Psychology and the Combined Program in Education and Psychology. Her research is focused on the acquisition of mathematical and scientific concepts and the contextual factors—including instruction—that support their acquisition.
She has been honored with teaching awards, such as being named to the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent consecutively for the past 7 years, and with research awards, such as College Distinguished Scholar and a National Academy of Education Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. She led her as department as Chair for 7 years and is former Associate Editor for American Educational Research Journal.