A Helping Hand in Assessing Children’s Knowledge: Instructing Adults to Attend to Gesture

The spontaneous hand gestures that accompany children’s explanations of concepts have been used by trained experimenters to gain insight into children’s knowledge. In this article, 3 experiments tested whether it is possible to teach adults who are not trained investigators to comprehend information conveyed through children’s hand gestures. In Experiment 1, we used a questionnaire to explore whether adults benefit from gesture instruction when making assessments of young children’s knowledge of conservation problems. In Experiment 2, we used a similar questionnaire, but asked adults to make assessments of older children’s mathematical knowledge. Experiment 3 also concentrated on math assessments, but used a free-recall paradigm to test the extent of the adult’s understanding of the child’s knowledge. Taken together, the results of the experiments suggest that instructing adults to attend to gesture enhances their assessment of children’s knowledge at multiple ages and across multiple domains.