Think Aloud Protocol
The Think Aloud Protocol (or Think Aloud Method) is a method that is used to collect data for educational research and a wide range of other social sciences (e.g. pretest procedures). The Think-Aloud method involves participants thinking out loud while performing a group of specific tasks (e.g., educational diagnostic test). The subjects are asked to say everything they are thinking, what they are looking at, what they are doing and feeling, while they are working on the task in parallel. This method gives observers the opportunity to gain first-hand data about the human processing process for a task. Observers in such a procedure are required to record everything from the execution of the test. An interpretation is not required, rather an observation language should be used ("TP frowns and says: 'This is a tricky question', etc."). In many cases, video and / or voice recordings are also used in order to be able to refer precisely to a specific partial situation after the test process.
A related, but slightly different, data collection method is the Talk Aloud protocol. This method wants the test subjects only to say what they are doing, but not to give any deeper explanations about it. This method is considered more objective because the test subjects do not give any interpretations of their actions.
In the sense of Häder (2006), a distinction is made between two different sub-categories of the Talk Aloud protocol:
- Concurrent Think Aloud
- Retrospective Think Aloud
The Concurrent Think Aloud method wants people to think aloud while the test item is being processed. The Retrospective Think Aloud method, on the other hand, lets the test subjects complete a task before a recapitulation of their train of thought is planned.
literature
- M. Häder: Empirical social research - an introduction, textbook . Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialforschung (2006).