Taxonomy of Observed Teacher Thinking

I finished the first round interviews with two lecturers at my university. Although they gave informative accounts about their teaching and beliefs, I really don’t know what to do with these data. It’s like I am standing in front of a gigantic pile of lollies. “You asked for lollies? Here they are….sort them out by yourself…take your time”. I got what I want to know about them. They have answered every question I asked. But the problem is…what I’m going to do with it. Trying to untangle from data chaos, I start looking for methods of eliciting and evaluating teacher cognition. I want to find some relevant taxonomy which may help me capture the nature of teacher cognition.

There we go ....I found evaluations of changes in cognition presented in a previous study.

Winnie WIng-mui So (1997). A study of Teacher cognition in Planning Elementaty Science Lessons. Research in Science Education. Vol 27(1), P.71-86.

Calderhead (1990) discusses some frameworks and methods used in the exploration of teacher cognition. Among the methods mentioned are concept mapping, the structured tree approaches, think aloud protocols and stimulated recall, script writing and critical incident techniques.

Kagan (1990) classified methods used in case of programme evaluation into five groups:
direct and non-inferential way of assessing teacher belief
methods that rely on contextual analysis of teachers’ descriptive language
taxonomies for assessing self-regulation and metacognition
multimethod evaluations of pedagogical knowledge and beliefs
concept mapping

According Kagan’s classification, the first two approaches (direct and non-inferential way of assessing teacher belief ; methods that rely on contextual analysis of teachers’ descriptive language) can assessed nothing more than verbal facility, not appropriate for describing complicated cognitive activity. Though concept mapping revealed the highest complexity, Tang and Watkins (1994) commented that there was difficulty in constructing the concept maps of the teachers from interview protocols.

However, Tang and Watkins (1994) could not differentiate experts and novices with these taxonomies because Hong Kong teachers seldom explicitly disclosed their underlying theories. Instead, they proposed and developed another taxonomy, the Taxonomy of Observed Teacher Thinking (TOTT) which was related to the quality of teacher cognition.

Taxonomy of Observed Teacher Thinking (Tang & Watkins, 1994, p.41)

Prestructural
The teacher is distracted or misled by an irrelevant aspect not related to the teaching/
learning environment. Thus, the teacher is not able to provide reasons for his/her
planning or can only describe some irrelevant aspects as reasons.

Unistructural
The teacher focuses on the relevant domain but considers only one aspect of the
learning context. Thus, the teacher only makes simple decisions based on reasons
within a single aspect of learning/teaching.

Multistructural
The teacher picks up more and more relevant features but does not integrate them
together. Thus, the teacher can consider many aspects of learning/teaching but
cannot find interrelationships between these aspects.

Relational
The teacher integrates the parts so that the whole has a coherent structure and
meaning. Thus the teacher can make complex interrelated decisions based on a
series of reasons or can utilise conditional thinking to develop different contingency
plans when faced with different situations.

Extended abstract
The teacher generalises the structure to take in new and more abstract features,
representing a higher mode of operation. For example, the teacher builds up a theory
about desirable teaching and learning after contemplating different aspects of
learning/teaching and formulates a series of actions based on this theory.

The TOTT provided a systematic way of describing the complexity of teacher cognition in various tasks undertaken in schools, such as lesson planning, and interactive and evaluative processes. The findings indicated that there was a strong correlation between the two groups of teachers in terms of expertise.

Back to my research, I think my study includes the whole body of teacher cognition in using technology in their teaching, not just the planning process. Moreover, a comparison between experts and novices is not the main objective of the research. But it is very useful to know the structural complexity of teacher cognition in terms of planning science lessons.

What am I going to do next time in the interview with lecturers.

I will ask them to provide reasons for their plan, choices of materials and activities, and instructional decision. Then the interview protocol will be analysed to find evidence of complexities at different levels. One more thing that I wanna try to use at the interview is the critical incident technique, from my understanding, I would ask them to provide solutions to scenarios of instructional failures. To see what would they react if something wrong happened in their classes.