Getting access to what goes on in people's heads?: reflections on the think-aloud technique
Proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction
Computer science students' difficulties with proofs by induction: an exploratory study
Proceedings of the 44th annual Southeast regional conference
User Interface Design and Evaluation (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies)
Teaching programming and problem solving to CS2 students using think-alouds
Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
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Think aloud protocol has traditionally been used to probe thinking and problem solving skills. In a series of student interview sessions where think aloud protocol was used to study student problem solving skills in mathematical induction at the University of British Columbia, a significant percentage of the students had difficulty verbalizing their thoughts while solving a problem. At other times, students felt pressured in coming up with a solution, or they were afraid of making incorrect steps and wanted to be certain before they actually articulated their thought process. As a result, a number of interviews resulted in almost complete silence and little was gained. To this end, we developed an enhanced, scenario based think-aloud protocol, designed to engage subjects during the interviews without having them feeling pressured or having to perform in front of an interviewer. In the process, the subject becomes less and less conscious of being studied and becomes more immersed in the actual problem solving with her own thoughts and ideas. In this paper we will describe this augmented think aloud protocol, and discuss our experiences of using this tool to assess mathematical induction reasoning in computer science students. A number of essential skills are identified through these interviews that may help instructors identify improved pedagogical methods for teaching the subject.