Related Data for: How bodily engagement support design in groups: An exploratory study of hand gesture patterns in higher and lower-performing groups in design tasks

Collaborative learning plays an instrumental role in productive engineering design, during which students employ multiple communication channels simultaneously to co-construct and negotiate ideas. However, existing literature on the design process mostly focused on students’ verbal discussion, overlooking hand gestures during design discourses. This study aims to investigate hand gesture employment patterns during essential engineering design discourses as well as their differences in higher and lower-performing design groups. 15 dyads of fourth-year undergraduate students participated in this study, whose collaborative engineering design behaviors were video recorded. Quantitative ethnography methodology was adopted to identify hand gesture patterns in higher- and lower-performing groups in design tasks. This study found that higher-performing groups tended to apply depictive gestures, and echo gestures while lower-performing groups applied metaphorical gestures during discussion. Besides, lower-performing groups used gesture alternation to build upon others’ ideas while higher-performing groups employed gesture alternation to redirect and negotiate ideas. The empirical evidence expands the current understanding of hand gestures’ role in design thinking and collaborative learning. The findings provide a direct reference for embodied design and instructions for productive collaborative learning in authentic engineering classrooms.