Educational Research Journal

Abstract

The suitability of six established taxonomies of teacher thinking were considered for use in analysing the interview protocols of the planning practices of four expert and four novice teachers of Chemistry in Hong Kong secondary schools. Each was found to be wanting for our purposes either because they required more specialised probing than provided by our interview material or they proved to lack ecological validity in terms of discriminating between the cognitions of the expert and novice teachers. A Taxonomy of Teacher Thinking (TOTT) was then developed to classify the structural complexity of the teachers' thinking. TOTT was adapted from the established SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982) of student thinking. Evidence is provided of the reliability and ecological validity of TOTT. We suggest that this taxonomy may be of value to other researchers as it would seem to be suitable for analysing evidence of teacher thinking from a range of sources.

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