Teacher Cognition: Differences in Planning and Interactive Decision Making between Experienced and Inexperienced Teachers

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to describe the decision making processes employed by experienced and inexperienced teachers as they planned for and taught two lessons in physical education. Eight elementary physical education teachers with five years or more of teaching experience and eight elementary teachers in training thought aloud as they planned two physical education lessons subsequently taught to four elementary school children. Following each lesson, the decision making strategies employed during interactive instruction were accessed using a stimulated recall technique. Results indicated that, when planning, experienced teachers made more decisions concerning strategies for implementing instructional activities than did inexperienced teachers. During interactive teaching, experienced teachers focused most of their attention on individual student performance, while inexperienced teachers attended most frequently to the interest level of the entire class of students. The findings indicated that experienced teachers possess knowledge structures rich in strategies for managing students and facilitating psychomotor performance that enabled them to attend to individual student performance and alter their lessons in accordance to student needs. In contrast, inexperienced teachers possessed fewer of these strategies and focused their attention on the interest level of the entire class to insure that the children were busy, happy and well-behaved.