The think aloud method: a practical approach to modelling cognitive processes 论文

摘要

Thinking aloud 1.1 A first impressionSuppose that you want to understand the design process of architects, the knowledge that they use, the cognitive actions that they take and the strategies they employ.How would you go about this?One obvious possibility is to ask some architects how they design a building.Interestingly enough, they will not find this an easy question to answer.They are used to do their job, not to explain it.If they do try to tell you how they go about their design work, it is quite possible that their account of it will be incomplete or even incorrect, because they construct this account from memory.They may be inclined to describe the design process neatly in terms of the formal design methods that they acquired during their professional training, whereas the real design process deviates from these methods.Psychologists have demonstrated that such accounts are not very reliable.Another possibility is to look at the architects' designs and at their intermediate sketches.However, now you are looking at the products of the thought processes of these architects, and not at the thought processes themselves.What is needed are more direct data on the ongoing thinking processes during working on a design.If you want to know how they arrive at their designs, what they think, what is difficult for them and what is easy, how they reconcile conflicting demands, a different research method is needed.A good method in this situation is to ask architects to work on a design and to instruct them to think aloud.What they say is recorded and used as data for analysis of the design process.This is a very direct method to gain insight in the knowledge and methods of human problem-solving.The ' ... well yes, I do not need to further what you call it, with the components, that makes no difference, anyhow' 'and that is ... well, it should in any case be larger'