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A Collaboration Script for Nonverbal Communication Enhances Perceptual Fluency with Visual Representations

: Visuals can help students learn only if they understand what visuals show. This involves perceptual fluency: the ability to automatically see meaning in visuals. To support perceptual fluency, instructional interventions support inductive learning by providing simple tasks that require quick attention to relevant features. Sociocultural research shows that collaboration affords nonverbal communication behaviors that helps students attend to visual features more quickly, which helps them acquire perceptual fluency. In contrast, cognitive research suggests that collaboration is ineffective for learning from simple tasks. Hence, we ask: Can collaboration via nonverbal communication enhance the acquisition of perceptual fluency? We investigated this question by examining how 10 dyads collaborate on simple perceptual tasks via nonverbal communication. We analyzed gestures and interviews about learning experiences. Further, we compared dyads’ performance on perceptual activities to 28 students who worked on the activities individually. Our findings suggest that collaboration helps students acquire perceptual fluency with visuals.