Learning Activities and Teachers’ Decisionmaking: Some Grounded Hypotheses

Abstract

Stimulated-recall data were gathered in interviews with 12 elementary school teachers describing the decisions they made during lessons conducted shortly before. Ideational units were identified in the protocols, and a grounded theory analysis was conducted. Categories and terminology were generated and, using the constant comparative technique, hypotheses grounded in the data were developed. The first hypothesis embeds these teachers’ interactive decisionmaking (IDM) in the structure of the lessons they were conducting, and subordinates IDM to teachers’ cognitive representations of the activity at hand. The second hypothesis identifies the central intention of IDM: to move a learning activity to completion according to the cognitive representation; and the third hypothesis specifies the role of decision rules and routines.