Think-Aloud Interviews 1 Running head: THINK-ALOUD INTERVIEWS FOR EDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT Two Types of Think Aloud Interviews for Educational Measurement: Protocol and Verbal Analysis

projects are encouraged to express freely their professional judgment. This paper, therefore, does not necessarily represent the positions or the policies of the Canadian government, and no official Almost every scholarly or scientific discipline is, in part, defined by the activities, including the methods and instruments, which systematically advance the teaching, research, and practice within the discipline. Although many natural and social scientists have adopted the scientific method for studying phenomena, the scientific method is only a philosophical framework for organizing a series of steps in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. The specific methods and instruments used to collect, analyze, and interpret data will differ depending on the discipline. The general sequence of steps associated with the scientific method include observing, defining, and measuring a subject of interest, inducing hypotheses or explanations about the observations and measurements made, deducing predictions from those hypotheses, and finally conducting experiments to test the hypotheses and predictions made. Chemists and physicists may use different methods to instantiate each of these steps. For example, chemists may use the electron microscope to observe phenomena whereas physicists may use space radiation and underground detectors. In the social sciences, including educational measurement, unique methods and instruments can also be found to instantiate each of the steps associated with the scientific method. One method that is receiving increasingly greater attention is think-Think-aloud interviews can be used to observe, define, and measure the contents of students' minds as they solve test items (on educational assessments). There are a series of formalized procedures associated with how to conduct and record the data produced from think-aloud interviews so that the contents of student minds are measured accurately. These formalized procedures and corresponding data will vary depending on whether students are asked to (a) verbalize their problem-solving processes (i.e., intentions, cognitions, plans) as they work through a task or (b) verbalize their knowledge, beliefs and attitudes about a task. Although there is currently no single method available that identifies the contents of a person's mind directly, think-aloud interviews and its data source, verbal reports, are considered by Think-Aloud Interviews 3 many educational and cognitive psychologists to be a close alternative. The objective of this paper is to present two types of think-aloud interviews that can be used to develop cognitive models of task performance for educational measurement. The paper is divided into three sections: first, a rationale for think-aloud interviews within …