From: Mercedes Monaco
Submit: Post Message
Date: 11 Dec 1996
Time: 21:00:31
I sited your field note in my paper and was wondering if you'd like to be quoted or left confidential. This is the paragraph as it is so far:
Every undergraduate in the program wrote field notes about their experience at the site. The field notes contained a description of events, as well as the undergraduates reactions to the events. The undergraduates posted their field notes on a confidential class web site. The field notes contain many examples of non-verbal communication. The most common examples in the field notes were pointing, moving the mouse, smiling, and silence. Sometimes the communication could be as simple as a child pointing to a piece to show another child how to move in a game. Other times the child's pointing could demonstrate a complex interaction. One undergraduate wrote, "I noticed she came up with the answer immediately (her mouse pointer would hover over the correct answer while I watched her read over the remaining possibilities. )" (C., 1996). The undergraduate heard the child reading possibilities but noticed what the child was saying nonverbally. The undergraduate interpreted that the child knew the correct answer, but was reading other possibilities to make sure. This can contribute to our understanding of the child's learning process. If only listening to verbal cues we would assume that the child first read all possibilities carefully, and then chose the answer. But, if we see her nonverbal cue, moving the mouse to the correct answer first, we can conclude that the child quickly made her decision, but waited to check her answer before actual selection.