Beyond analyzing frequencies: Exploring teacher professional vision with epistemic network analysis of teachers’ think-aloud data

Background

Teacher professional vision describes how teachers perceive classroom events, interpret these events, and form decisions about next strategies. As indicators of visual expertise, noticing, and reasoning, analyses of think-aloud protocols can offer useful insights into novice and expert teachers’ mental models of observed classroom management events.

Aims

Informed by the cognitive theory of visual expertise, the study compared two methods—a standard frequency-based approach and epistemic network analysis (ENA)—for analysing think-aloud data from novice and expert teachers. The aim was to illustrate the potential of both methods in revealing how teachers integrate noticed visual information and classroom management scripts into elaborate mental representations of classroom management events.

Sample

Participants were 19 pre-service and 20 in-service teachers.

Methods

Teachers’ think-aloud data after watching a video with critical classroom management events were coded and analysed using a standard frequency-based approach and epistemic network analysis.

Results

The frequency-based approach counted the number of codes, indicating that experts verbalized student learning, teacher behavioural management, and alternative management strategies more frequently than novices. In comparison, ENA visualized the temporal co-occurrences of codes within event-related utterances, indicating that novices struggled to make sense of events while experts were able to integrate information and scripts into more elaborate and well-structured mental models.

Conclusions

When compared to a frequency-based approach, ENA can provide deep insights into teachers' mental representations of classroom management events. ENA is thus a useful novel method to examine teachers’ integration of information into mental models as indicators of professional vision and expertise.