Stimulated Recall

My experience with Stimulated Recall was much more effective than my use of the Think Aloud protocol last week. Although I wish I used Stimulated Recall directly after my Think Aloud, I reintroduced the material and the recording before I asked my student to recall his reasoning during the writing process. My "data" was much more detailed and revealing than the Think Aloud.

For example, when I asked my student how he found the words to explain "his dreams" (the class writing assignment based on Cisnero's The House on Mango Street). He told me, "well I spoke them in my mind, but sometimes when I typed them... I didn't like them so I edited them until I liked them". This appeared to evidence of what Flower and Hayes referred to as goal setting and translation. My student appeared to set a goal for his assignment and then translate his ideas into words.

My second question about the assignment was about my student's use of similes throughout the paper. I was impressed by the use of similes, but I had to ask when he incorporated the literary devices into the paper. He told me that, "after my first draft I thought it looked sweet and good, but then, I wanted to make it amazing and I tried to add the similes. So I read it and thought about where I could add them and the I typed them and and...um... keep the one's I liked the most." This reflection made me think of the revision and discovery part of Flower and Hayes writing process.

Overall, I found this process more effective than the Think Aloud, but I was glad that I had the original recording to refer to during the recall procedure.

Think Aloud Reflection

This week I attempted to gather a useful Think-Aloud recording of a student working through a piece of writing. I was able to get 7 minutes of reflection and speaking from my selected student, but instead of thinking through the editing process, my student really focused on reading aloud his draft and only paused a few times to think about what he was writing and why. After the first read aloud, I asked him to go back and edit and share the similes he included in the piece in an effort to get more details about his writing process. This activity helped me gain insight into his thought process and actually served as a strong understanding check for the student, but it wasn't as authentic as I was hoping the recording would be.


At least I was able to gather such gems as:

"I put a lot of similes because I'm, I'm like nasty at them"

and

"But, I really want to be a wrestler. A hard core, high flyin', sensational hall of famer, like Hulk Hogan, Stone Cold Steve Austin, the Rock and all of those good people."