People who interview young children for criminal investigations and other inquiries could elicit false information through their own gestures, particularly if the child is inarticulate, research at the University of Chicago shows.

The gestures the children make can also reveal important information that lawyers and police investigators may be missing by not paying attention to hand movements, said Susan Goldin-Meadow, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and an expert on gesture.

Interviewers go into the sessions with a great deal of information from parents and others, and although they are encouraged to ask open-ended question, they may provide clues to children through their gestures that encourage the youngsters to “remember” things that the youngster did not witness, the study found.

“While others have suggested that interviews should be videotaped, we suggest that the videotaping needs to be arranged so that both interviewer and witness are visible on camera,” wrote Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology, along with her former student Sara Broaders in “Truth is at hand: How gesture adds information during investigative interviewers,” published in the current issue of Psychological Science.

For an interview with the researchers, please contact William Harms at 773-702-8356, w-harms@uchicago.edu

“Ours is the first study to show that misleading gesture can have long-term effects on the veracity of children’s reports,” Goldin-Meadow said.

“Although it is unrealistic to expect investigators to review videotapes of an entire interview, it should be possible to check videotapes for nonverbal cues whenever a key fact is first mentioned,” said Broaders, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Northwestern University and lead author of the paper. “Such procedures are needed to ascertain whether the interviewer or witness first introduces a fact into testimony.”

The taping and attention to gesture is important because some of the pivotal information children communicate and pay attention to is conveyed only through gesture. People working on legal cases involving children frequently use written transcripts that do not include information about gesture, the authors pointed out.

To study the role of gesture in what children witness and later report, the scholars arranged for a professional musician to perform in seven classrooms, playing several instruments, wearing particular items of clothing and performing actions unrelated to the performance.

The study was conducted with 39 students, ages five and six, who were interviewed five times over a 10-to-12-week period. The arrangement is similar to what children experience when they are interviewed as part of a criminal investigation.

The researchers used two sets of questions for four of the interviews, one in which interviewers used no gesture and one in which gesture was included. A fifth interview was open-ended and sought to gather all the information children remembered about what they saw.

The study found that youngsters noticed gesture when it was used and responded by imitating the gesture they saw. When an interviewer asked a question such as “What was the musician wearing?” with a gesture that indicated a hat, the students frequently said the musician was wearing a hat even though he was not. The fact that the interviewer misled the child would show up in a videotape of the interview, but would be absent from a written transcript.

Transcripts can be misleading because they do not report information conveyed only in gesture.

“In these instances, a later interviewer who had access only to a written transcript would not be able to tell that the hat was introduced into the interview by the first interviewer, rather than the child. Moreover, 71 percent of the details children conveyed in their gestures were never found in their speech—written transcripts would provide no access to this information at all,” Goldin-Meadow said.

As well as being part of the unit’s assessment, the event is designed to give students a rewarding experience and help them on their way to finding work soon after graduating from University. For some particularly high performing students, there was an extra unexpected bonus. As in previous years, a few of the student interviewees actually received job offers as a result of their interviews. One student from Bachelor of Science/Bachelor of Education (Secondary) and one from Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) both impressed so much in the interviews they have been offered teaching positions as a result of the interviews.

One successful student told us after his interview; “It was interesting; it was insightful to get a feel for the questions that were asked and my responses to them. I tried to stay confident and answer to the best of my ability… one of the principals noted that she had a position opening up in my specialism that she strongly suggested that I should apply for it. Since then I have applied and I’m waiting to hear back!”

Another student told us; “I thought the mock interview was just a university requirement. (I thought) jobs being offered at the mock interview was just a rumour to get students to take it more seriously.” The student says he was “really excited” to be made an offer (which he has accepted) teaching geography, Chinese and science at a secondary school in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.

The mock interviews provide a valuable link between the Education Faculty and highly experienced professionals such as Principals. This link is vital in developing partnerships in the preparation of future teachers with the profession itself. The Faculty of Education would like to thank all of the interviewers who gave up their time to attend and interviewees for taking part and making this event such a terrific success. We wish you every success in your new careers, wherever in the world that may be!

Releasing the review, ACER Chief Executive Professor Geoff Masters said that even limited contact with a second language can have a positive effect by supporting and illuminating students’ knowledge of their first language.

“There are significant demonstrated educational benefits from studying a second language from the early years of schooling”, Professor Masters said.

The new review, Second Languages and Australian Schooling (Australian Education Review 54), authored by University of Melbourne academic Professor Joseph Lo Bianco, traces the history of language learning in Australia, outlines the findings of research from Australia and overseas and proposes a new rationale for language learning policy.

The central argument in the review is for a major improvement in the quality of language teaching across the nation. Professor Lo Bianco argues that, while the single most important variable in second language education is the quality of language teachers, at times the quality of language teaching in Australia has been too low.

“It is an unfortunate aspect of past policy that utilitarian rationales, and the often crisis-driven pressure to establish programs quickly, have resulted in a proliferation of rather superficial second language teaching endeavours.”

Professor Lo Bianco believes the promotion of language study by governments as being related to labour market and economic issues has failed to convince students, their schools and parents, that the learning of a second language is worthwhile.

“We must get away from these old conflicts about which languages should be favoured that have dogged the debate for 30 years,” Professor Lo Bianco said. “These arguments must be replaced with an educational rationale for major improvements in quality teaching and learning.”

Almost 90 per cent of Australian senior secondary students do not study a second language at all. Professor Lo Bianco identifies seven Asian and European languages – Chinese (Mandarin), French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese and Spanish – that students should have ‘an entitlement to continuation’ allowing them to continue studies throughout their schooling and proposes support systems for a wider range of languages.

Joseph Lo Bianco is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne.