Six experienced teachers of fourth and fifth grades read and made judgments about the appropriateness, attractiveness, usefulness, and effectiveness of each of 32 short descriptions of language-arts activities. The activity descriptions had been edited to vary systematically on five features: amount of student involvement; difficulty for students; integration of multiple skills or subject matters; demand on the teacher; and fit between stated purpose and instructional process. Each teacher thought aloud during the judgment process; these deliberations were audiotaped and transcribed. A policy-capturing analysis indicated that only small proportions of variance in teacher judgments could be explained in terms of the five manipulated cues. A process-tracing analysis of the protocols of two of the six teachers revealed that they were attending to several activity features in addition to the five mentioned above. The process-tracing analysis also provided a description of how the teachers defined and modified the judgment task and drew upon their own professional experiences to comprehend, edit, and evaluate the activity descriptions. The process-tracing approach appears to be a more promising method of inquiry into complex teacher-judgment tasks than is the policy-capturing approach. (Authors/JD)