"Please keep talking" understanding the various methods of conducting Think Aloud Interviews

Understanding how students think and their associated thinking strategies have been a long held goal for educational research into learning. Methods to investigate these cognitive and metacognitive processes range from eye tracking to neuroimaging which provides quantitative data through to student ‘Think Aloud’ (TA) interviews thus providing qualitative verbal data. TA is a non-invasive inexpensive neuroimaging validated means to assess thinking. However in the literature authors are rarely explicit about how they conducted TA other than reference to the validated TA protocol of ‘Please keep talking’. It is therefore difficult to learn this method and appreciate how TA can be adapted to rigorously explore a range of cognitive phenomena. A short introduction will orientate participants by presenting the various types and rationale to implement a TA process that ranges from concurrent, retrospective and video stimulated recallTA.