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Prior work has shown that many undergraduate students have misconceptions about genetic inheritance, even after they take genetics courses. Visual representations, such as pedigree diagrams, are commonly used in genetics instruction, and they help students quickly visualize the phenotypes of multiple generations. In Study 1, we examined whether presenting a pedigree diagram of a wolf’s eye color in a rich and realistic manner (i.e., with rich perceptual images that resemble real animals) or in an abstract manner (i.e., with circles and squares representing animals) would help undergraduates learn from a brief, online lesson on inheritance of the wolf’s eye color, and whether they would transfer what they learned when reasoning about eye color in other species (near transfer) and other traits in other species (mid- and far transfer). Counter to our hypothesis, students transferred more with the rich diagram. In Study 2, we compared the rich diagram from Study 1 to a perceptually bland diagram (i.e., with color and textural features removed). There were no differences in students’ learning or transfer between the diagrams. These results suggest that realistic elements that are attention grabbing and easily interpretable by students can be beneficial for transfer in online lessons.

This study investigated the spontaneous co-speech gestures produced by speakers who were talking about the concepts of addition and subtraction in a television news setting. We performed a linguistic and co-speech gesture analysis of expressions related to the concepts of addition (N plus N, addition, add) and subtraction (N minus N, subtraction, subtract). First, we compared the linguistic frequency of these structures across several corpora. Second, we performed a multimodal gesture analysis, drawing data from a television news repository. We analyzed 423 co-speech gestures (169 for subtraction and 254 for addition) in terms of their axis (e.g., lateral, sagittal) and their direction (e.g., leftwards, away from their body). Third, we examined the semantic properties of the direct object that was added or subtracted. There were two main findings. First, low-frequency linguistic expressions were more likely to be accompanied by co-speech gestures. Second, most gestures about addition and subtraction were produced along the lateral or sagittal axes. When people spoke about addition, they tended to produce lateral, rightwards movements or movements away from the body. When people spoke about subtraction, they tended to produce lateral, leftwards movements or movements towards the body. This co-speech gesture data provides evidence that people activate two different metaphors for arithmetic in spontaneous behavior: arithmetic is motion along a path and arithmetic is collecting objects.

Abstract Why do people change their strategies for solving problems? In this research, we tested whether negative feedback and the context in which learners encounter a strategy influence their likelihood of adopting that strategy. In particular, we examined whether strategy adoption varied when learners were exposed to a target strategy in isolation, in conjunction with their own current strategy, and in conjunction with another novel strategy. We also investigated the roles of individual differences, including learners’ need for cognition and their confidence in their current strategies. In Study 1, undergraduate participants who encountered a target strategy in isolation were more likely to adopt it than participants who encountered it in the context of their own current strategy. Negative feedback, low confidence, and high need for cognition also predicted greater adoption. In Study 2, we examined whether rates of strategy adoption depended on the target strategy itself. Indeed, participants were more likely to adopt one strategy than the other, and the effects of feedback also varied across strategies. Individual differences—need for cognition and confidence—also influenced patterns of strategy adoption. These results suggest that strategy adoption depends on the confluence of many factors, including the context in which a target strategy is introduced, characteristics of the learner, and characteristics of the strategy itself.

A rising epistemological paradigm in the cognitive sciences—embodied cognition—has been stimulating innovative approaches, among educational researchers, to the design and analysis of STEM teaching and learning. The paradigm promotes theorizations of cognitive activity as grounded, or even constituted, in goal-oriented multimodal sensorimotor phenomenology. Conceptual learning, per these theories, could emanate from, or be triggered by, experiences of enacting or witnessing particular movement forms, even before these movements are explicitly signified as illustrating target content. Putting these theories to practice, new types of learning environments are being explored that utilize interactive technologies to initially foster student enactment of conceptually oriented movement forms and only then formalize these gestures and actions in disciplinary formats and language. In turn, new research instruments, such as multimodal learning analytics, now enable researchers to aggregate, integrate, model, and represent students’ physical movements, eye-gaze paths, and verbal–gestural utterance so as to track and evaluate emerging conceptual capacity. We—a cohort of cognitive scientists and design-based researchers of embodied mathematics—survey a set of empirically validated frameworks and principles for enhancing mathematics teaching and learning as dialogic multimodal activity, and we synthetize a set of principles for educational practice.

We present an emerging interdisciplinary approach to the study of mathematics learning, which brings together strands from psychology and mathematics education. Our aim was to examine how students navigate the cognitive and social aspects of peer collaboration as they generate and adopt new strategies. We analyzed video data from a laboratory study involving pairs of elementary students working collaboratively to solve mathematical equivalence problems (e.g., 8 + 5 + 4 = 4 + ___). We adopted a qualitative micro-analytic approach that focused on multimodal action (i.e., verbal utterance, gesture, inscription production, body positioning, and eye gaze) to examine three cases. These cases illustrate the complex ways that students interacted in this particular context and, in some instances, attempted to teach one another. Our findings show how “relational equity” (Boaler, 2008) and mathematics knowledge were co-constructed differently in each case. We argue that a micro-analytic approach, complemented by a blending of theory from these two fields, reveals hidden aspects of the interaction that may help explain, for example, why some students generate or adopt correct strategies and others do not. As such, this interdisciplinary approach offers a rich account of the learning processes that occur in peer collaboration.

Collaborations between psychology and mathematics education have the potential to yield progress on critical questions about the teaching and learning of mathematics. In this paper, we describe our experience of collaborating at this boundary. We have found that collaboration has many benefits: it strengthens the research, it is professionally enriching, and it brings novel perspectives to disciplinary communities. However, collaboration is also challenging, because different views about the nature of knowledge and the aims of inquiry can be difficult to bridge. Collaboration can also raise difficult questions about professional identity. We consider several factors that are critical to success in interdisciplinary collaboration, including methodological openness, a broad view of what constitutes “basic” and “applied” research, and an appreciation for diverse perspectives and varying levels of analysis. We close by offering some advice for others who wish to collaborate at the boundary of psychology and mathematics education.

Abstract During mathematics instruction, teachers often make links between different representations of mathematical information, and they sometimes use gestures to refer to the representations that they link. In this research, we investigated the role of such gestures in students’ learning from lessons about links between linear equations and corresponding graphs. Eighty-two middle-school students completed a pretest, viewed a video lesson, and then completed a posttest comparable to the pretest. In all of the video lessons, the teacher explained the links between equations and graphs in speech. The lessons varied in whether the teacher referred to the equations in gesture and in whether she referred to the graphs in gesture, yielding four conditions: neither equations nor graphs, equations only, graphs only, and both equations and graphs. In all conditions, the gestures were redundant with speech, in the sense that the referents of the gestures were also mentioned in speech (e.g., pointing to “2” while saying “2”). Students showed substantial learning in all conditions. However, students learned less when the teacher referred to the equations in gesture than when she did not. This was not the case for gesture to graphs. These findings are discussed in terms of the processing implications of redundancy between gesture and speech, and the possibility of “trade-offs” in attention to the visual representations. The findings underscore the need for a more nuanced view of the role of teachers’ gestures in students’ comprehension and learning.

Do children think of genetic inheritance as deterministic or probabilistic? In two novel tasks, children viewed the eye colors of animal parents and judged and selected possible phenotypes of offspring. Across three studies (N = 353, 162 girls, 172 boys, 2 non-binary; 17 did not report gender) with predominantly White U.S. participants collected in 2019-2021, 4- to 12-year-old children showed a probabilistic understanding of genetic inheritance, and they accepted and expected variability in the genetic inheritance of eye color. Children did not show a mother bias but they did show two novel biases: perceptual similarity and sex-matching. These results held for unfamiliar animals and several physical traits (e.g., eye color, ear size, and fin type), and persisted after a lesson.