Department of Health Sciences Faculty Articles

Generating Thinking-Aloud Protocols: Impact on the Narrative Writing of College Students

Document Type

Article

Publisher

University of Illinois Press

ISSN

0002-9556

Publication Date

Spring 1995

Keywords

Writing Processes, Literary Criticism, Reactivity, Writing Exercises, Grammatical Clauses, Written Composition, Writing Assignments, Writing Research, Writing, Cognitive Psychology

Abstract

The reactivity of protocol analysis, a widely used process-tracing method in writing research, was investigated. Writers composed a letter to a close friend in each of three conditions: a concurrent thinking-aloud protocol, a retrospective protocol based on watching a real-time replay of the original composition, and a no-protocol control. The rate at which words were composed per minute and clauses created per minute was significantly slower in the thinking-aloud condition, presumably because of the additional demands of verbalization. Intrusions, or content occurring because of writing in a psychology experiment, were also assessed. The percentage of intrusions referring to being in an experiment, or to content in general, were the same across conditions. Thinking aloud slowed the rate of composition, but did not reliably alter the syntactic complexity or quantity of words or clauses written.

DOI

10.2307/1423102

Volume

108

Issue

1

First Page

89

Last Page

98

Disciplines

Medicine and Health Sciences

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