Scaffolding Design Guidelines for Learner-Centered Software Environments / Chris Quintana, Joseph Krajcik and Elliot Soloway.

If learners are to engage in science inquiry, they need significant support, or scaffolding, to help them mindfully do the cognitive science tasks that are just out of their reach. One approach for supporting learners is to design computational tools that incorporate scaffolding features to make new practices accessible and visible so learners can engage in and understand these practices. In order to explore the systematic design and assessment of scaffolding features for software tools, the authors developed "Symphony," a comprehensive scaffolded work environment incorporating process scaffolding features for ninth grade science students performing environmental science investigations. The research questions asked what conceptual process scaffolding strategies would support learners and how can those scaffolding strategies be realized in software. The scaffolding assessment involved three broad steps: identifying specific episodes where students used scaffolds to perform different inquiry activities; assessing how students used different scaffolds in each episode using a new set of assessment criteria; and summarizing the assessment information for each scaffold to describe how students used the different scaffolds over time. By analyzing how learners worked with the Symphony scaffolds, an initial set of design guidelines was distilled for software-based scaffolds. Two example overviews of findings are presented, followed by a description of some scaffolding design guidelines that were distilled from the full set of scaffold overviews. (Contains 33 references.) (AEF)

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