A $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund a joint Purdue University-University of Illinois study to improve online learning environments by including instructional gestures and cueing known to help students conceptualize abstract concepts.

The NSF’s EDU Core Research (ECR:Core) program is supporting the three-year project entitled Collaborative Research: Understanding Cueing Gesture within Video Learning Environments for Statistics Education, which will run from September of 2024 to August of 2027. Led by Purdue School of Engineering Education Assistant Professor Jason Morphew, Ph.D., and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Professor of Educational Psychology and Curriculum & Instruction Robb Lindgren, Ph.D., the project will focus on the online teaching of mathematical literacy and statistical reasoning to college-level and K-12 students, but the results are anticipated to have wide-ranging applications.

Since the first fully online course was offered in 1981, researchers have studied ways to make the experience better for learners. Today, most traditional universities offer online instruction, either through stand-alone courses or within courses that feature a flipped classroom strategy that reserves face-to-face activities for team projects and instructor-guided problem solving. In addition, the workforce sector has increased its training via free open-portal MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses.

The goal of the study is to design asynchronous, remote, online instruction that incorporates two embodied learning principles—gestures and cueing—known to enhance learning and help students retain knowledge. Understanding how to effectively translate instructional gestures and cueing (e.g. asking students to repeat gestures) into digital video learning environments is especially important for statistics and other subjects within the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) realm, which require students to conceptualize abstract concepts such as tolerances and variability.

“An instructor’s use of gestures and body movement can serve as a way to anchor abstract ideas,” Morphew said. “For example, an instructor will employ the ‘right-hand rule’ in physics to teach electricity and magnetism. This technique requires instructors to demonstrate the direction of current by putting their thumb in the direction of current with fingers curling in the direction of the magnetic field.”

The project will interview students and experts to examine the gestures related to productive reasoning about statistics topics. Researchers will then develop several versions of interactive digital-video learning environments to teach statistics topics to engineering and non-engineering students, and then examine the learning differences between the different versions.

"We want to give online instruction designers ideas for how to make their instruction more grounded and more meaningful for students," Lindgren said. "In our studies, we will be looking at how students use these 'cued gestures' in their own explanations of core statistical concepts, and we will assess how their knowledge of these concepts does or does not integrate these gestures. We hope to also give guidance to educational media and animation creators for how to better develop resources for online learning."