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Concept
Instructional scaffolding
Summary
Instructional scaffolding is the support given to a student by an instructor throughout the learning process. This support is specifically tailored to each student; this instructional approach allows students to experience student-centered learning, which tends to facilitate more efficient learning than teacher-centered learning. This learning process promotes a deeper level of learning than many other common teaching strategies.
Instructional scaffolding provides sufficient support to promote learning when concepts and skills are being first introduced to students. These supports may include resource, compelling task, templates and guides, and/or guidance on the development of cognitive and social skills. Instructional scaffolding could be employed through modeling a task, giving advice, and/or providing coaching.
These supports are gradually removed as students develop autonomous learning strategies, thus promoting their own cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning skills and knowledge. Teachers help the students master a task or a concept by providing support. The support can take many forms such as outlines, recommended documents, storyboards, or key questions.
There are three essential features of scaffolding that facilitate learning.
The first feature is the interaction between the learner and the expert. This interaction should be collaborative for it to be effective.
The second is that learning should take place in the learner's zone of proximal development. To do that the expert needs to be aware of the learner's current level of knowledge and then work to a certain extent beyond that level.
The third feature of scaffolding is that the scaffold, the support and guidance provided by the expert, is gradually removed as the learner becomes more proficient.
The support and guidance provided to the learner are compared to the scaffolds in building construction where the scaffolds provide both "adjustable and temporal" support to the building under construction.
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