On the adequacy of verbal protocols in examining an underlying construct of a test

This paper investigates the usefulness of a verbal protocol approach in examining the underlying construct of a cloze test, i e. the reasons that a test writer had for deleting some lexical items from a passage to construct a cloze test. The informants were asked to “think aloud” while they were doing the cloze test. Observation of the informants verbalising their thoughts revealed inadequacies in using this approach. To compensate for this inadequacy, retrospective interviews in which the informants were asked about their choices after their verbal protocols, were conducted. The analyses of the informants' think-aloud and their retrospection showed that in their think-aloud they could not verbalize all the mental processes they used in taking the test. The results, however, suggest verbal protocols as useful instruments for collecting a particular type of data which is inaccessible when using other approaches.