Fading Distributed Scaffolds: The Interplay Between Instructor and Material-Based Scaffolds

• In Event: 75.019 - Scaffolding Students' Learning in Formal and Informal Contexts

Abstract

Teachers face the challenge of supporting numerous students with different individual needs in one classroom. Ideally, teachers would individually scaffold their students within each student’s zone of proximal development (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976), but this is not feasible in real-world classrooms. In an attempt to combat this problem, scaffolds can be distributed across different instructional tools, activities, and agents, providing many opportunities to simultaneously support all students (Puntambekar & Kolodner, 2005). While support can be implemented across different instructional tools, the interaction between these distributed scaffolds is crucial to students’ successful learning, and the interplay between instructor and material-based scaffolds is still not understood (Lajoie, Guerrera, Munsie, & Lavigne, 2001). Students need adaptive learning environments (Azevedo, Cromley, & Seibert, 2005), but most instructional materials are inherently static. While we can build support in software and paper-and-pencil tools that consider predicted areas of difficulty for students, teachers play a vital role in the ongoing diagnosis of students’ needs.

Our study investigates how the relationship between scaffolding embedded in instructional materials and scaffolding provided by teachers affects student learning. When instructional scaffolds are designed so that support is gradually reduced, do teachers help students by appropriately adjusting their own support in order to mediate the loss of instructional material-based support? We hypothesize that differences in student performance are due to differential teacher-mediated scaffolding as the scaffolding embedded in instructional materials fade.
CoMPASS is an ongoing project designed to teach middle-school physics. Students solved design problems involving rollercoaster-centered physics concepts over the course of a 14-week unit. Students used simulations, hands-on activities, and an e-Textbook while working on problems. Students received support in multiple forms, including the e-Textbook, prompts in students’ scientists’ journals, collaborative learning groups, and trained classroom teachers. Prompts in the journals acted as scaffolds by guiding students as they worked on science investigations. In this study, we analyzed sixth-grade students from two different teachers and examined the prompts for one specific activity, the “Report Out.” The “Report Out” activity asked students to draw conclusions and report findings after each experiment completed while solving their design problems. The prompts in the “Report Outs” gradually became more open-ended over the course of the unit, resulting in three different levels of prompt support.

Findings indicated a significant difference in quality of student answers in the classes of the two teachers. The students from Teacher 1 showed consistent performance across all three “Report Out” prompt types as questions became more open-ended. On the other hand, students from Teacher 2 performed significantly worse on the most open-ended prompt type than on the more structured prompts, and these students performed significantly worse on said open-ended questions than the students from Teacher 1.

This poster will discuss how the two teachers provided support that complemented the prompts in the scientists’ journals. We will discuss how differences in teacher-provided scaffolding may mediate the learning outcomes of students as they receive gradually reduced support from instructional materials.

References Available

Authors

• Nicole Danielle Martin, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Catherine Louise Dornfeld, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Dana Gnesdilow, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Sadhana Puntambekar, University of Wisconsin