Components of Software-Realized Scaffolding
The challenge of supporting students engaged in programming for
modeling and simulation has two components:
- To facilitate student's programming activity;
- To facilitate student's learning about and through the activity of
programming.
The process of teaching an activity and facilitating learning about
the activity has been refined for ages through apprenticeship
in the practice that educators
refer to as scaffolding. Scaffolding is:
- Support which enables a student to achieve a goal or action
that would not be possible without that support;
- Support which facilitates the student learning to achieve the goal
or action without the support in the future.
Three critical types of support are combined to provide scaffolding:
- Communicating process: A master communicates a process to the
apprentice, which typically means demonstrating the process with
verbal annotation to highlight key points. A good master structures
(often involving simplifying) the process to make it easier to
communicate. The presentation itself may take on many forms
(including a simple lecture), all of which are contextualized (or
situated) in that the master is providing necessary knowledge for the
apprentice who is about to undertake the very same process.
- Coaching: When the apprentice is attempting the action or goal,
the master watches and makes comments, provides hints, reminds the
apprentice of the process which was communicated, etc.
- Eliciting articulation: The master occasionally asks the
apprentice to articulate key concepts about the apprentice's action or
goal, e.g., "Why are you doing that?" "Stop! Is that what I told you
to do?" "What do you call that?" and so on. The point of eliciting
the apprentice's articulation is to encourage reflection Ð an
important cognitive activity which is critical for effective learning
A critical piece to the concept of scaffolding is fading. If the
scaffolding is successful, students will learn to achieve the action
or goal without the scaffolding. For students to practice the action
or goal without the scaffolding, the scaffolding must fade. Fading
should not be all-or-nothing. Instead, scaffolding should be
adapted to individual student needs, typically through gradual
reductions in scaffolding. Students who are more capable (e.g.,
have more background knowledge, learn the action or goal faster)
should have less scaffolding, that is, more fading of the provided
scaffolding. However, fading does not need to be a continuous range Ð
discrete levels of support that facilitate student can provide the
necessary flexibility such that each student is facilitated in
performance and learning without being stifled by too much scaffolding
or failing due to too little scaffolding.
Good teachers use scaffolding to support students in learning to
achieve a goal or process. I hope that good learning software would
use software-realized scaffolding: providing the same kind of support
as teachers do with traditional scaffolding, but in a software-based
learning environment. The goals in software-realized scaffolding are
the same as with traditional scaffolding: to facilitate student
performance and to facilitate student learning. Emile is an attempt to facilitate
student programming for modeling and simulation by implementing
scaffolding in the programming environment. The challenge in creating
Emile was to provide the full set of scaffolding activities (i.e.,
communicating process, coaching, and eliciting articulation, with
fading) in the limited bandwidth of human-computer interaction.
References
- Guzdial, M. (1994 (Submitted)). Software-realized scaffolding to
facilitate programming for science learning. Interacive Learning
Environments. (Above is modified from this paper.)
- Guzdial, M. J. (1993). Emile: Software-realized scaffolding for
science learners programming in mixed media. Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Michigan.
- Soloway, E., Guzdial, M., Brade, K., Hohmann, L., Tabak, I.,
Weingrad, P., & Blumenfeld, P. (1993). Technological support for the
learning and doing of design. In M. Jones & P. H. Winne (Eds.),
Foundations and frontiers of adaptive learning environments New York:
Springer-Verlag.
- Soloway, E., Guzdial, M., & Hay, K. E. (1994). Learner-centered
design: The challenge for HCI in the 21st century. Interactions, 1(2),
36-48.
Contact information:
Ma
rk Guzdial
Graphics, Visualization & Usability Center
College of Computing
801 Atlantic Drive
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA, 30332-0280
404-853-9387
E-mail :
guzdial@cc.gatech.edu