ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an interview of Susan Goldin-Meadow, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, who studies non-verbal communication with specific emphasis on gestures. It looks at the role of gesture in the development of young children's understanding of mathematics. Goldin-Meadow's doctoral dissertation grew out of a deep interest in where language comes from. One of Goldin-Meadow's early findings regarding the role of gesture in learning emerged when she was reexamining tasks made famous by Jean Piaget–specifically tasks that assess children's understanding of conservation. According to Ruth Church and Goldin-Meadow, the results suggest that children move through three stages when learning about conservation. Goldin-Meadow and colleagues theorized that using gestures might have been easier due to the one-to-one correspondence between the number of fingers and the number of objects shown on the card. Goldin-Meadow's extensive research on gestures touches on the full spectrum of the complex role gesture plays in the teaching and learning dynamic.
