Understanding student teachers’ reflective thinking using epistemic network analysis and fine-grained trace data

In teacher education, it is important to design activities for enabling student teachers to deal with teaching problems and cultivate their reflective thinking. Because of the dynamic, interdependent, and temporal nature of reflective thinking, uncovering the reflective thinking process comprehensively via a sophisticated learning analysis approach can help to inform the pedagogical design and learning environment design. In this study, based on the discourse trace data drawn from 40 student teachers in an eight-week course, content analysis, statistical analysis, and epistemic network analysis were adopted to explore student teachers’ reflective thinking process. The results showed that student teachers paid more attention to the content and premise aspects of reflection, but less attention to the process aspect of reflection. In terms of the stage of reflection, student teachers were in a lower stage of reflection and lack of deep reflection. Differences in reflective thinking between the high- and low-score groups were compared, and the result illustrated that in-depth understanding and analysis of learning tasks could be observed in the early stage of collaboration, reflection on the problem-solving process took place in the middle stage of collaboration. Combined with previous experience, timely self-reflection and evaluation in the late stage of collaboration were more conducive to good collaborative performance. In addition, this study revealed how group members changed their behavior to better promote self-reflection during online collaborative learning activities. Finally, the limitations, implications, and future research direction of this study are discussed.