A Descriptive Study of Experienced and Novice Teachers’ Interactive Instructional Thoughts and Actions

Abstract

The study reported in this paper was aimed at developing a methodology for describing competent classroom teaching performance and analyzing components of competent classroom decision making to be used in improving pre-service and in-service teacher training programs. Information processing research suggests that expertise in semantically rich domains involves the ability to apply knowledge effectively in response to environmental cues. This study investigated differences between experienced and novice teachers in terms of: a) their use of student performance cues; b) their instructional actions and the relationship of these actions to student performance cues; and c) the nature of their instructional goals and prior instruction-related knowledge. Stimulated recall data were collected on three experienced and five novice teachers. Results showed that while both groups attended to the same number of cue categories, experienced teachers implemented twice as many kinds of instructional actions and considered a greater variety of goals, while exhibiting more complex associations between cue and action categories.