“Sometimes I Have to Figure Things Out by Talking About Them”: Conceptualizing Think-Aloud Protocols as Spaces for Reflexivity During Open Textbook Construction

Open textbooks, freely available open educational resources, have an ever-growing presence in learning environments around the world, though detailed studies of their development are rare. The challenges of tracking textbook writing activity in a precise manner over time may account for this sparsity. To highlight how process-tracing research can contribute insight to the textbook development literature, particularly that focused on open textbook writing, this study addresses the roles that think-aloud protocols (TAPs) played during the construction of an open corequisite writing textbook. The volume, which was designed with underprepared university students in mind, stresses the growth of academic and workplace writing skills together with effective study techniques, and its two novice coursebook authors used self-recorded concurrent verbalization and interviews to document its creation. By analyzing the data collected via means of qualitative content analysis, they found that concurrent verbalization exposed actual textbook writing behaviors, logged instances of metacognitive awareness, and documented project reflections, and herein they frame TAPs as spaces abundant with opportunities to view reflexivity (reflective practice) and learning during open textbook production. The research evidences the various functions concurrent verbalization may serve in process-tracing studies of textbook writing and demonstrates that the method can be deployed in flexible ways to address research objectives and make progress on writing projects that demand considerable time and focus. It also explains the advantages of collecting TAP data over successive writing sessions to detect reflexivity during materials development.