Large projects, presentations, and papers are all a part of any college-level course. They are a great way to comprehensively assess a student’s knowledge that allow them to show off different skills than a traditional exam. It is important that we incorporate these types of assessment into our courses, but students often do not know where to start. While it is true that our students should have learned these skills in previous classes or in high school, we cannot always guarantee that is the case. If the student spends most of their time trying to figure out how to start and format a large project, then we are not effectively testing what they know; we are actually testing to see how well how well they can figure out the formatting for your assessment and the content comes second. This is where scaffolding comes in.
Scaffolding is the process of building up a student’s skills so that they can complete more difficult tasks on their own. There are a few ways of going about this, but it essentially boils down to demonstrating a specific skill to the student, giving them guidance on how to complete it on their own by completing smaller, related tasks, then having them complete the larger project on their own. In short, it is breaking up larger assignments into smaller ones to help students successfully complete the larger one (University of Michigan, 2023). Meta-analysis on online scaffolding literature between 2011 and 2021 has shown that scaffolding has a significant positive effect on both student learning outcomes and student self-regulation (Zuo et al., 2023).
In practice, scaffolding in the classroom should be a mixture between creating manageable tasks for the students and professor support. According to the self-determination theory and cognitive evaluation theory, one of the largest factors supporting student achievement is positive feedback from the professor (Acosta-Gonzaga and Ramirez-Arellano, 2022). This is part of the reasons that scaffolding is so successful; breaking up larger assignments into smaller ones provides more opportunities for a professor to provide feedback to students. Also, these additional opportunities for teacher feedback lead to higher rates of student engagement (Skinner et al., 2008), leading to self-regulation since students have more confidence in their capability to perform a given task.
For example, if you had the student write a paper at the end of the semester, the interactions and assignments leading up to it may be:
- The professor models an example paper to give students an idea of what they are looking for.
- Students submit a thesis statement and five potential sources that they could use.
- Students submit a general outline of their paper with its major points and sources.
- Students submit a rough draft of their paper.
- Students turn in their final paper.
After steps 2 through 4, you would give the students guidance on areas where they could improve their paper, things that they did especially well, and where they could go from that point. These are already the steps that students should be taking to complete their assignments, so scaffolding does not mean that they do less work, it just means that they get additional support while they are building the skills and confidence to do it on their own. Another way to scaffold the student is to give them additional assignments that will build up a skill, but do not necessarily relate to the larger assignment. For example, if the final paper was a literary critical analysis, you may have them write shorter analyses on other works throughout the course so that you could give them feedback and help them build up that skill. If you would like more information on how to provide good feedback, please refer to one of our previous articles, “Effective Feedback that Feeds ‘Forward.’”
During this process, it is also worthwhile to have the student evaluate their own work and learning as a way to scaffold self-regulation. These types of reflections do not need to be after every task, but reflecting on their own work and how much they have learned throughout the scaffolding process is an excellent way to enhance a student’s self-regulation abilities. The idea behind this is that students have a tangible way to track their process, making them more confident when they encounter difficult concepts later on since they can see how they overcame equally challenging content in the past. If you would like to help them monitor their growth on a regular basis instead of after major assignments, you may consider having the students journal each week (Song and Kim, 2020). It should be a low-stress activity for the students, so writing a paragraph on what they learned, what they struggled with, and how they overcame that struggle would be sufficient.
References:
Acosta-Gonzaga, E., & Ramirez-Arellano, A. (2022). Scaffolding matters? Investigating its role in motivation, engagement and learning achievements in higher education. Sustainability, 14(20), 13419.
Skinner, E., Furrer, C., Marchand, G., & Kindermann, T. (2008). Engagement and disaffection in the classroom: Part of a larger motivational dynamic?. Journal of educational psychology, 100(4), 765.
Song, D., & Kim, D. (2021). Effects of self-regulation scaffolding on online participation and learning outcomes. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 53(3), 249-263.
University of Michigan. (2023, March 16). Scaffolding strategies to guide and support student learning: U-M LSA LSA Technology Services. LSA Technology Services. https://lsa.umich.edu/technology-services/news-events/all-news/teaching-tip-of-the-week/scaffolding.html
Zuo, M., Kong, S., Ma, Y., Hu, Y., & Xiao, M. (2023). The Effects of Using Scaffolding in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis. Education Sciences, 13(7), 705.