Title: Support of active, self-reliant learning via the WWW by means of cue scaffolding

Authors: J.C. Winnips

Addresses: University of Twente, Faculty of Educational Science and Technology, Department of Instrumentation, PO Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands

Abstract: In this article, an overview of techniques and possible implementations of scaffolding is given. After that the concept of scaffolding is brought into practice as giving support, and thereby fading this support when no longer necessary. One of the major goals of scaffolding is to increase the self-reliance of students. Six different forms of scaffolding are discerned, with three types of control over the process of scaffolding teacher control, student control, and computer control. In an experiment in a course about the design of educational media products the question was addressed whether scaffolding support could be given with the help of pre-planned hints, or whether the support given should be more social in nature, and not planned beforehand. An exercise was designed with hints to scaffold students when learning to program in JavaScript. From analysis of the answers to this assignment, and from analysis of the server log files of this exercise it appeared that 18 out of 48 students did not do the work individually, but sought help with their peer students. As a result of these findings peer control is added as a form of control over the process of scaffolding hereby stressing the importance of including peer students when learning and giving feedback on exercises.

Keywords: scaffolding; support; self-regulation; server-log; hints.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2000.000372

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2000 Vol.10 No.1/2/3/4, pp.296-313

Published online: 16 Jul 2003 *

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