This week, I received an email from Faculty Focus with the above title. I recommend you check it out for yourself. Here’s a short excerpt that might provide modest motivation for learning how to apply this technique:
Even if you didn’t want to use it in a rigorous study design, the idea of listening to students as they try to deal with content has got to be revealing. In the cognitive psychology research, think alouds have been used to differentiate expert and novice knowledge and thinking processes. As I have pointed out in previous posts, it is so easy for faculty experts to forget how novices think about the content. Yes, it can be depressing, even frightening, since most students do not think all that deeply about our content. But knowing where they start allows for a more efficient journey to where they need to be. As Calder’s experience shows, you can then design a course, in his case one where he used the content to explicitly teach six cognitive habits: questioning, connecting, sourcing, making inferences, considering alternate perspectives and recognizing limits to one’s knowledge.