Research On The Influence Of Gesture Assistance On Concept Understanding In Programming Courses

Programming education is of great significance to the cultivation of talents in the new century.Especially in primary school,there are programming difficulties due to learners’ insufficient understanding of concepts.In addition to the abstract nature of the concept itself,there are also some factors,such as improper teaching methods,learners’ inability to effectively build psychological models,lack of physical interaction with things and so on.Most of the existing researches and explorations are from the tools of technical support and the use of metaphorical teaching methods to promote students’ conceptual understanding,but they are still shackled by the thought of dissociative dualism of traditional cognitive science,ignoring the participation of learners’ physical experience in conceptual learning.To solve this problem,this study proposes to add conscious gesture design to programming teaching activities,so that students can try to use gesture assistance to carry out core concept understanding and learning in programming learning activities.In order to verify the effectiveness of this design,this paper focuses on the following aspects:(1)Firstly,this study combs the relevant literature on the role of teachers’ nonverbal behavior and students’ nonverbal behavior in teaching and the current situation of programming concept understanding.Combined with conceptual metaphor theory,embodied cognition theory and embodied metaphor theory,this study takes the three basic programming concept structures of sequence,cycle,condition and branch as examples,The standard design of gesture script is based on the natural gesture generated by students when explaining programming concepts.(2)Carry out experimental design and develop research tools.The experiment selects two classes of students in Grade 5 of a primary school in Zhejiang Province as the experimental objects,and adopts the design of the experimental group(telling students to consciously make normative gesture communication)and the control group(not telling students to make gesture communication)to explore the impact of telling students to consciously make gestures and not being told to make gestures on their concept understanding in the programming course,including programming works,programming concept test scores,programming attitude and cognitive load.(3)Carry out experimental research.The results show that the scores of programming concepts and scratch works in the gesture group are significantly higher than those in the control group,but they have no effect on sequence concepts.It shows that students’ combination of metaphorical gestures can effectively improve the understanding of programming concepts,but it has no significant effect on easily understood concepts.At the same time,students can represent programming in the form of image structure through gestures;Inform students that understanding programming concepts in combination with metaphorical gestures can effectively reduce cognitive load,which plays a partial mediating role.It shows that one mechanism by which gestures can help students understand programming concepts is the psychological effort to reduce cognitive load by adjusting students’ cognitive resources;In the programming course,guiding students to understand programming concepts in combination with metaphorical gestures has no effect on programming attitude.(4)Put forward targeted suggestions for primary school students’ programming learning.These include: in the programming course,teachers can evaluate students’ understanding of concepts by observing students’ natural gestures.When learning programming concepts,teachers can guide students to explain programming concepts and produce specific metaphorical gestures,so as to help students accurately understand programming concepts.When students encounter programming difficulties due to obstacles in understanding programming concepts,teachers can encourage students to communicate problem-solving ideas and complete programming homework in combination with specific gestures.Gesture can be used as a teaching tool to guide the teaching practice of concept understanding in programming learning.This study has limitations such as experimental object and experimental environment.In addition,the experimental sample size is too small and the composition type is single,which are also the direction of follow-up research.