Think-aloud Protocol Analysis Research Articles

Guidelines: A Cross-Cultural Reading/Writing Text by Ruth Spack

Issues in Applied Linguistics Vol. 1 No. 2 Reichardt, C.S. Cook, T.D. (1979.) Beyond qualitative versus quantitative methods. In T.D. Cook & C.S. Reichardt (Eds.), Qualitative and quantitative methods in evaluation research (pp. 7-33). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Smith, J.K. & L. Heshusius. (1986). Closing down the conversation: The end of the quantitative-qualitative debate among educational inquirers. Educatioruil Researcher, 15(1), 4-12. Smith, J.K. The evaluator/researcher as person vs. the person as evaluator/researcher. Educational Researcher, 17(2), 18-23. van Lier, L. (1988). The classroom arui the language learner. London: Longman. Brian Lynch is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also serves as Academic Director of the ESL Service Courses. His primary research interests are program evaluation, language testing, and English TESL & for Specific Purposes. Guidelines: A Cross-Cultural Reading/Writing Ruth Spack. New York: St. Martin's, 1990. vii-338 pp. Text. Reviewed by Christine Holten and Carol University of California, Ann Linn Los Angeles Recent research in the fields of first and second language composition has increased our understanding of the kind of activity writing is. Hayes & Flower (1980, 1987), for example, using think-aloud protocol analysis of both skilled and unskilled writers at work, have found that first-language composing is a recursive, goal-oriented activity consisting of three major processes: planning, sentence generation, and revising, all of which occur in free variation throughout the production of a written text. Similarly, investigations of the composing behaviors of L2 writers (Jones & Tetroe, 1984; Raimes, 1987; Gumming, 1988) have paid particular attention to the interaction between writing skill and second language proficiency. While neither the relative weight of linguistic factors and writing ability nor their interaction with other variables (e.g., language background, length of residence in the L2 environment, age, and education) has been precisely determined.

Think-Aloud Protocol Analysis: An Investigation of Reading Comprehension Strategies in Fourth-and Fifth-Grade Students

School assessments too often ignore the process of individuals' cognitions. As part of a systematic effort to develop an assessment procedure focused on the tactics used to facilitate reading comprehension, this research investigated Lytle's (1985) approach to think-aloud protocol analysis. Data are presented for fourth- and fifth-graders that show the degree to which they used reasoning, elaboration, signaling understanding, analysis, judging, and monitoring doubts while they were reading three fictional passages. The percentage of each move used by individual subjects was stable across the three stories that were administered. Significant correlations were obtained between comprehension of the passage used to obtain the think-aloud protocols and two of the six categories of moves: Reasoning and Signaling Understanding. These students used Elaboration, Signaling Understanding, and Reasoning most frequently; they used Monitoring Doubts less frequently; and they rarely used Analysis and Judging. Unique contributions of this research include the extension of previous work with this method to elementary school students, demonstration of stability in the use of moves across the three stories, and detection of correlations between this system and comprehension of the passage used to obtain the think-aloud protocol. Suggestions are made for future research that concerns the validity of think-aloud protocol analysis as a diagnostic technique and an approach to facilitate comprehension skills.

The Effects of Task Size and Similarity on the Decision Behavior of Bank Loan Officers

Research on decision-making behavior has shown that decision strategies used by individuals are contingent upon the characteristics of the task. For example, as the task size (i.e., the number of alternatives and/or the number of dimensions describing each alternative) increases, individuals tend to quickly eliminate alternatives that do not meet a criterion level for any dimension (i.e., they adopt a noncompensatory decision strategy, in which a high value on one dimension cannot offset or compensate for a low value on another dimension). Most of this research has involved consumers making buying decisions. The purpose of the research reported here was to determine if contingent decision behavior extends to experts (experienced bank loan officers) making business decisions (loan decisions). In this study two task characteristics (task size, and similarity of loan profiles describing alternatives) were varied in a bank loan decision context. Two process tracing methods (information boards and think-aloud verbal protocol analysis) were used to obtain evidence of how eleven bank loan officers made choices among alternative loan candidates. Of particular interest was the effect that changes in task characteristics had on loan officers' decision strategies. The results indicated that when faced with tasks of increasing size, loan officers adapted their behavior in a manner consistent with an increased use of noncompensatory decision strategies. In contrast, when the loan profiles of candidate companies were similar loan officers exhibited an increased use of compensatory strategies. It was also found that when both the task size and similarity of alternatives were varied loan officers adapted their behavior as if they processed these characteristics serially. These results indicate that contingent behavior associated with the two types of task characteristics may be quite different. A priori, there was reason to believe that expert loan officers would not exhibit contingent decision behavior. The fact that their decision strategies were contingent upon task characteristics has important implications for managerial practice and research. First, the results have design implications for information and decision support systems for lending institutions. Second, future research should investigate the consequences of serial processing of task characteristics.