Think-Aloud Protocol Analysis

Fundamental Assumptions and Issues Underlying Think-Aloud Protocols

One of the most common methods in the study of thinking, reasoning, problem solving, and learning is to elicit verbal reports. Verbal data stems from a long research tradition in psychology rooted in the work of William Chase, Herbert Simon, Anders Ericsson, and Micki Chi.

This entry focuses on concurrent think-aloud protocols and not on other types of verbal reporting, such as retrospective protocols. First, it should be emphasized that verbal reporting methods differ in important ways. For example, in concurrent think-aloud protocols, the participants are instructed to verbalize the problem information to which they are attending. By contrast, in structured interviews, questions are usually carefully crafted to focus on a specific topic or scenario and are often sequenced in a meaningful order. Explanations are sometimes given to questions generated by a peer, by oneself, or by an experimenter, and they can be retrospective and reflective. As such, they represent different ways to collect verbal reports and are the target of ongoing debates such as those over whether giving verbal reports actually changes one’s processing of the task, or whether different knowledge elicitation methods elicit different kinds of knowledge from the participants. Not only can verbal reports be collected in several different ways, they can be collected within the context of any number of other tasks, such as a perception task, a memory task, or a sorting task.

According to Ericsson and Simon, protocol analysis is used to identify and measure problem-solving processes. In protocol analysis, the think aloud requires individuals to provide verbal reports of their thoughts simultaneously as they solve a task. This focus on simultaneous thinking aloud is a strict requirement of protocol analysis in order to identify the contents of students’ working memory as directly as possible. The contents of working memory are of primary interest because they are associated with executive functioning. Working memory is the memory location where attentional resources are allocated when individuals seek to solve problems and, therefore, this is the memory location of interest for measuring (and acquiring evidence to support inferences) about a student’s problem- solving processes.

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