Gestures As A Tool For Researchers: What the hands reveal about novices and experts' ontological categorization that language doesn't

Abstract

Many studies in the field of “conceptual change” focus on exploring the nature of learner conceptions and how concepts differ across different levels of expertise. In the 1990s, Chi and colleagues developed the Ontological Shift theory (Chi & Slotta 1993; Chi, Slotta, & de Leeuw, 1994). They proposed that learners incorrectly categorize science concepts into the matter category while experts would categorize these concepts into the process category. From this perspective, learning requires that novices undergo a recategorization of scientific concepts, shifting these concepts from the matter to the process ontological categories. In contrast, proponents of a dynamic ontologies view have argued that learners possess a wide range of resources, with ontological metaphors considered among these resources that learners activate when thinking about science (Amin, 2009, Dreyfus et al., 2014). The current study is, in part, a replication of the study conducted by Slotta et al. (1995) while adding gestures as an analytical lens onto novices and experts’ ontological categorization alongside the use of language as a source of information about learner and experts’ ontological categorization. Specifically, this study aimed to examine whether the analysis of gestures (alongside speech) can be used as a productive method to identify learners and experts’ ontological categorization of science concepts. It also aimed to identify whether the analysis of gestures and speech indicate the same or different ontological categorizations. Participants were provided with multiple choice problems targeting the science concepts heat, light and electric current and they were requested to formulate explanations of the outcomes they predicted in each case. The analysis of participants’ verbal explanations revealed that in the context of their explanations, experts more frequently categorized the target science concepts as a process while novices categorized them as material substances. This supports to a certain extent the theoretical position held by proponents of the Ontological Shift theory. Yet, the analyses of gestures revealed how gestural predicates – which were primarily spatial and involved coordination of a variety of material substance metaphors – frequently indicated material substance ontological categorizations of a science concept even by experts. Therefore, in expert explanations, speech and gestural predicates were often inconsistent with one another. Overall, these findings (especially in relation to experts) show that ontological metaphors are activated and coordinated and can be considered among the resources that support thinking of abstract science concepts as a process. This supports the theoretical position held by proponents of the dynamic view of ontology. As such, the study concluded by proposing an intermediate perspective which suggests that the shift toward greater expertise (i.e., conceptual change) entails refinement as well as radical restructuring where various metaphors are coordinated leading to the construction of a process ontological category. Such theory implications have implications for the design of instruction which entails using symbolic representations and designing activities that support the development of process ontological category.