Yeo, Amelia

Teachers’ efforts to guide students’ attention are potentially important for students’ learning. In this chapter, we consider two types of external supports that teachers frequently use to guide students’ attention: diagrams and gestures. We argue that teachers use diagrams and gestures to schematize specific features of mathematical problems or tasks, such as important elements and structural relations. In turn, teachers’ schematizing increases the likelihood that students encode those features. If the schematized features are relevant to the problem or task at hand, students’ appropriate encoding of those features will support their performance and learning. We present a selective review of research (including our own) on the roles of diagrams and teacher gestures in helping students encode key features and discern structure in instructional material.