Scaffolding in Complex Learning Environments: What

we have gained and what we have missed

Sadhana Puntambekar
Neag School of Education
University of Connecticut, 249 Glenbrook Road, Storrs, CT 06269-2064
[email protected]
(860) 486 4101

Roland Hbscher
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Auburn University, 107 Dunstan Hall, Auburn, AL 36849-5347
[email protected]

Scaffolding in Complex Learning Environments: What

we have gained and what we have missed
Sadhana Puntambekar
Neag School of Education
University of Connecticut, 249 Glenbrook Road, Storrs, CT 06269-2064
[email protected]

Roland Hbscher
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
Auburn University, 107 Dunstan Hall, Auburn, AL 36849-5347
[email protected]

Abstract
In recent years, there has been an upsurge of approaches based on a socio-constructivist
framework to help students learn science and math. As such, the notion of scaffolding is now
increasingly being used to describe the support provided to students to learn successfully in such
environments. In the past two decades, varied approaches to scaffolding student learning have
been put forth. Scaffolding has been provided in the form of paper-and-pencil tools, technology
resources, peer support or teacher-led discussions. The original notion of scaffolding, as used in
the initial studies of parent-child interactions or in teacher-student interactions, seems somewhat
narrow to explain the multifaceted nature of learning in complex learning environments,
especially when it involves helping an entire class of students learn successfully. However, by
broadening the scope of scaffolding, we seem to have missed some of the key features that are

crucial to successful scaffolding. While acknowledging that the original notion of scaffolding that
described the one-on-one interactions between an adult and child is not adequate for describing
the complex nature of learning in a classroom, we emphasize that some of the critical elements of
scaffolding are missing in the evolved notion. We discuss the key aspects of scaffolding and how
we can design and implement these features in the changed context of scaffolding classroom
communities.

Introduction

Few years back, Addison Stone (Stone, 1998) provided an insightful critique of the
metaphor of scaffolding and called for enriching the scaffolding metaphor, especially as
it applied to the field of learning disabilities. As a response to his article, Palincsar (1998)
pointed out that it is the atheoretical use of scaffolding that has become problematic
and seems to have occurred as we have become increasingly comfortable using scaffold
as a verb. She urged researchers in the field to consider repositioning the metaphor in
its theoretical framework, consider ways in which contexts and activities scaffold
learning, and research the relationship between scaffolding and good teaching. In this
paper, we would like to reiterate that recommendation for researchers in the field of the
Learning Sciences. As we move forward with the design and implementation of complex
learning environments1, many of which are technology enriched, the notion of
scaffolding is now increasingly being used to describe the different kinds of support
provided to students. The notion of scaffolding has evolved in the past two decades;

scaffolding is no longer restricted to interactions between individuals artifacts,

resources and environments themselves are also being used as scaffolds.

In the past two decades, varied approaches to scaffolding student learning have been put
forth. Scaffolding has been provided in the form of paper-and-pencil tools, technology
resources, peer support or teacher-led discussions. Scaffolding in the form of prompts to
help students reflect and articulate have been developed (Bell & Davis, 1996; Jackson,
Krajcik, & Soloway, 1998; Puntambekar & Kolodner, 2002). Different types of
scaffolding, either by varying the activities according to their difficulty or content of the
task (Luckin, 1998) have also been designed. For scaffolding to be effective in a complex
environment, the complementary roles that tools, resources, teachers and peers play in
providing a range of support have been explored (Puntambekar, Nagel, Hbscher,
Guzdial, & Kolodner, 1997; Tabak & Reiser, 1997).

The original notion of scaffolding, as used in the initial studies of parent-child

interactions (Bruner, 1975) or in teacher-student interactions, seems somewhat narrow to
explain the multifaceted nature of learning in complex learning environments, especially
when it involves helping an entire class of students learn successfully. But, by broadening
the scope of scaffolding, have we generalized it too much? Have we stripped the notion
off its original meaning? Where should we draw the line between support and
scaffolding? Is all support scaffolding? In this paper, we argue for a careful reexamination of the notion of scaffolding, particularly in the field of the learning sciences.
1

By complex learning environments, we mean classroom environments that are based on socioconstructivist approaches to learning, characterized by learning by doing, collaboration and negotiation.

While acknowledging that the original notion of scaffolding that described the one-onone interactions between an adult and child is not adequate for describing the complex
nature of learning in a classroom, we emphasize that some of the critical elements of
scaffolding are missing in the evolved notion. We discuss the key aspects of scaffolding
and how we can design and implement these features in the changed context of
scaffolding classroom communities.

Describing scaffolding

Scaffolding has been defined by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) as an adult controlling
those elements of the task that are essentially beyond the learners capacity, thus
permitting him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his
range of competence. The notion of scaffolding has been linked to the work of soviet
psychologist Lev Vygotsky. However, Vygotsky never used the term scaffolding, but
believed that learning first occurs at the social or interindividual level and emphasized the
role of social interactions as being crucial to cognitive development. Thus, according to
Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1978), a child (or a novice) learns with an adult or a more capable
peer, and learning occurs within the childs zone of proximal development (ZPD). ZPD
is defined as the distance between the childs actual developmental level as determined
by independent problem solving and the higher level of potential development as
determined through problem solving under adult guidance and in collaboration with more
capable peers (Vygotksy, 1978). Enabling the learner to bridge this gap between the

actual and the potential depends on the resources or the kind of support that is provided.
As Stone (1998) has pointed out, the original description of scaffolding by Wood et al.
was largely pragmatic, and it was later (Bruner, 1985; Cazden , 1979, cited in Stone,
1998), that the notion of scaffolding was linked with ZPD. Instruction in the ZPD then
came to be viewed as taking the form of providing assistance or scaffolding, enabling a
child or a novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal that she would not
be able to achieve on her own.

According to Greenfield (1999),

The scaffold, as it is known in building construction, has five characteristics: it

provides a support; it functions as a tool; it extends the range of the worker; it
allows a worker to accomplish a task not otherwise possible; and it is used to
selectively aid the worker where needed.

This analogy embodies two important elements of instructional scaffolding. Instructional

scaffolding enables a child or a novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a
goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts (Wood et al. 1976), and describes a
support that can be easily disassembled when no longer needed. But an important
difference, as Lepper, Drake, & ODonnell-Johnson (1997) have pointed out is that, this
analogy also carries an inappropriate connotation that the student, much like the worker
or the painter will return to ground zero when scaffolding is removed. Lepper et al.
pointed out that a more suitable analogy is that of a tunnel or an arch being supported by
a temporary structure while it is under construction. This support is later removed when

construction is complete and the tunnel or arch can stand on its own. Although an
appropriate analogy can be a matter of debate, the important aspect of scaffolding is the
support that an adult or expert provides to the learner, until the learner is capable of
performing independently after the support is removed. In the next few paragraphs, we
have summarized some of the key aspects of scaffolding provided by an adult or an
expert (e.g. Langer & Applebee, 1986; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Reid, 1998; Stone,
1998).

Key Features of Scaffolding

The original notion of scaffolding assumed that a single more knowledgeable person,
such as a parent or a teacher helps an individual learner, providing him or her with
exactly the help he/she needs to move forward (e.g., Bruner, 1975, Wood et al. 1976).
One of the most critical aspects of scaffolding is the role of the adult or the expert. Wood
et al. documented six types of support that an adult can provide: recruiting the childs
interest, reducing the degrees of freedom by simplifying the task, maintaining direction,
highlighting the critical task features, controlling frustration and demonstrating ideal
solution paths. In this description, the expert is the domain expert as well as a facilitator
who is knowledgeable of the skills, strategies and processes required for effective
learning. The expert not only helps motivate the learner by providing just enough support
to enable her to accomplish the goal, but also provides support in the form of modeling,
highlighting the critical features of the task, and providing hints and questions that might

help the learner to reflect (Wood et al. 1976). In this conception then, the adults role has
perceptual, cognitive as well as affective components (Stone, 1998).

Central to successful scaffolding is the notion of a shared understanding of the goal of the
activity. Although some elements of the activity may be beyond what the child could
accomplish by herself, intersubjectivity (Rogoff, 1990; Wertsch, 1985) or a shared
understanding of the activity is of critical importance. Intersubjectivity is attained when
the adult and child collaboratively redefine the task so that there is combined ownership
of the task and the child shares an understanding of the goal that she needs to accomplish.
This helps provide motivation for the child to complete the task. The adult/expert has to
ascertain that the learner is invested in the task as well as to help sustain this motivation,
making it worthwhile for the learner to risk the next step (Wood et al. 1976).

A key element of scaffolding is that the adult provides appropriate support based on an
ongoing diagnosis of the childs current level of understanding. This requires that the
adult should not only have a thorough knowledge of the task and its components, the
subgoals that need to be accomplished, but should also have knowledge of the childs
capabilities that change as the instruction progresses.
The effective tutor must have at least two theoretical models to which he must
attend. One is a theory of the task or problem and how it may be completed. The
other is a theory of performance characteristics of the tutee. Without both of
these, he can neither generate feedback nor devise situations in which his
feedback will be more appropriate for this tutee, in this task at this point in task
mastering. The actual pattern of effective instruction then, will be both task and

tutee dependent, the requirements of the tutorial being generated by the

interaction of the tutors two theories (Wood et al. 1976, p. 97).

The ongoing diagnosis leads to a careful calibration of support (Stone, 1998) so that the
adult is able to provide graduated assistance (Stone, 1998) of different types. The adult
draws from a repertoire of methods and strategies, constantly fine-tuning the support
based on the childs changing knowledge and skills, i.e., following a moving zone of
proximal development (Greenfield, 1999). Thus, the amount and types of strategies are
different not only for different learners with different levels of expertise, but also for the
same learner over a period of time. The adult may model the ideal solutions (Wood et al.
1976), or the appropriate strategies (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), or provide several types
of support such as offering explanations, inviting participation, modeling desired
behavior and providing clarifications (Roehler & Cantlon, 1997).

The ongoing assessment and adaptation of support is attained through the dialogic and
interactive nature of scaffolded instruction. The dialogic interactions (Reid, 1998), so
beautifully embodied in the reciprocal teaching studies (Brown & Palincsar, 1987;
Palincsar & Brown, 1984), enable the teacher an ongoing assessment of the students
understanding as well as allowing students to play a role in negotiating the interactions.
The dialogue between the student and the adult/expert is extremely important because it
allows students to exercise some control over the dynamics of the situation, and to
negotiate the instructional interaction (Reid, 1998) based on their evolving
understanding. It also enables the adult to monitor progress, provide appropriate support
and eventually fade the support so that the learner is now able to function on her own.
9

The final feature of scaffolding is fading the support provided to the learner so that the
learner is now in control and is taking responsibility for her learning. Vygotsky believed
that the cognitive processes that first occur on an interpsychological plane move on to an
intrapsychological plane, a process that he called internalization. There is a transfer of
responsibility from the teacher to the learner and the scaffolding can be removed, as the
learner moves towards independent activity. According to Vygotsky, internalization is
far from being a mechanical operation. In Wood et al.s original description, what is
important about the transfer of responsibility is that the child has not only learned how to
complete a specific task, but successful scaffolding entails that the child has also
abstracted the process of completing the particular activity and is able to generalize this
understanding to other similar tasks.

These key features, viz., intersubjectivity, ongoing diagnosis, tailored assistance and
fading are attained in the dynamic, flexible scaffolding that an adult provides to a child.
As we move the notion of scaffolding into classroom communities, the individualized
support is not possible. Scaffolding has therefore evolved to include multiple formats
providing multiple affordances.

10

Scaffolding classroom communities: Multiple modes, multiple

affordances

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of approaches based on a socio-constructivist

framework to help students learn science and math. For example, design activities are
being used as a means to promote science learning (Baumgartner & Reiser, 1998; Harel,
1991; Kafai, 1994; Kolodner, 1997; Lehrer & Romberg, 1996; Puntambekar & Kolodner,
1998). Inquiry and project-based approaches are also being used to help students learn
how to formulate questions, and to design and implement investigations (Blumenfeld et
al., 1991; Hoffman, Kupperman, & Wallace, 1997; Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, &
Soloway, 1991). Many of these approaches are based on a socio-constructivist model
(Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, Mcnamee, McLare, & Budwig, 1980) emphasizing that
learning occurs in a rich social context, marked by interaction, negotiation, articulation
and collaboration. As such, the notion of scaffolding is now increasingly being used to
describe the support provided to students to learn successfully in such environments.
However, the original notion of scaffolding in which a single more knowledgeable person
helps an individual learner, providing him or her with exactly the help he/she needs to
move forward, is not adequate to explain the scaffolding in a complex, interactive
classroom. Classroom situations involving many students do not allow for the fine-tuned,
sensitive, personalized exchange that occurs in a one-on-one situation (Rogoff, 1990).
Therefore, instead of one teacher working with each student, support is now being
provided in a paper or software tool that individuals interact with, or classroom activities
are being redefined so that peers can scaffold each other. In the field of the learning

11

sciences, the notion of scaffolding has therefore evolved to describe the support provided
in multiple modes and tools with different affordances.

We have summarized the change in the notion of scaffolding in Table 1. The evolved
notion of scaffolding has four main components. First, instead of a single knowledgeable
person proving support, we now have distributed expertise in which peers scaffold each
other, and resources as well as the learning environment itself is redesigned to provide
motivation as well as support. Second, because some of the support is being provided
through tools, computer-based or otherwise, the dynamic assessment that is so important
to scaffolding as described in the original notion, is no longer possible. Third, in many
instances, the current notion of scaffolding, especially in classrooms, focuses on
providing blanket scaffolding i.e., the amount and type of support is same for
everyone. Lastly, there is now more focus on scaffolding skills and processes of learning.
We will elaborate on each of these in this section as we discuss some of the recent
attempts at designing and implementing scaffolding in complex environments.

Original notion of scaffolding

Evolved (current) notion of scaffolding

Single more knowledgeable person,

provides motivation by sharing a
common goal, provides support to

Authentic task often embedded in the

environment, provides motivation

Distributed expertise support is not

complete the task

necessarily provided by the more

Multimodal assistance provided by a

knowledgeable person, but by peers as

single individual

well

12

Assistance of different types is

distributed across many agents, tools
and resources

Dynamic scaffolding - Ongoing

assessment of the learner (individual)

Passive support Ongoing diagnosis by

peers and or software is not necessarily
be undertaken

Adaptive scaffolding - Support is

Blanket scaffolding support

calibrated and sensitive to the

(especially in tools) is the same for all

changing needs of the learner

students

Eventual fading of scaffolding as the

In most cases support is permanent and

unchanging

students becomes capable of

independent activity

Scaffolding is provided both for

domain knowledge as well as skills

Support is mainly provided for skills

and processes

Table 1: Evolution of the notion of scaffolding

An important feature of scaffolding is the shared understanding of a common goal that

provides motivation to students to engage in the task. While this shared understanding of
the goal was achieved between the adult and the child in the original notion of
scaffolding, it is now important for the whole class or a group of learners to share the
goal and have ownership of the task so that they are motivated to learn. Enabling contexts
(Hannafin, Land, & Oliver, 1999), such as those provided by the anchors in the form of

13

video vignettes in the Jasper series (CTGV., 1990), or an authentic task (Palincsar,
1998), or by incorporating staging activities as in the BGuILE curriculum (Reiser, 2001),
not only provide students with the motivation for engaging in the activities but also create
a shared knowledge of the task or problem that they are required to solve. Another
interesting way to attain shared understanding is in the Learning by DesignTM (LBD)
curriculum, in which students work through an entire unit, the launcher unit (Holbrook &
Kolodner, 2000), that creates enthusiasm and engagement and also scaffolds the building
of skills such as collaboration, articulation, critiquing, etc. that students will be required
to use in other LBD units.

One of the most important aspects of providing scaffolding in a classroom is the support
that students provide each other as they engage in the process of inquiry, design and
investigations. In contrast to the adult being the expert in the traditional notion of
scaffolding, students support each other through their interactions. Brown et al. (1993)
emphasized the multidimensional nature of the interactions in a classroom embodying the
communities of learners approach. In this environment, learners of all ages and levels of
expertise and interests seed the environment with ideas and knowledge that are
appropriated by different learners at different rates, according to their needs and to the
current states of the zones of proximal development in which they are engaged.
Expertise is therefore distributed amongst all participants, who serve as cognitive
apprentices (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989) supporting and critiquing each other,
justifying views and opinions, and offering suggestions and explanations. The teachers
role changes from that of being a knowledge giver to a facilitator of a community in

14

which students engage in reasoning and justification, eventually helping them to adopt
these crucial skills as part of their personal repertoire (Brown and Campione, 1990).
Pea (1994) described the transformative nature of such interactions, in which students
attain a greater level of expertise as the dialogue progresses, and both students and
teachers co-construct knowledge.

This shared understanding occurs in a classroom as the tools, agents (teachers, peers) and
resources in the environment support multiple zones of proximal development. Students
learn at their own pace and scaffolding is provided not only by the teacher, but also by
peers as well as artifacts and resources (Brown et al., 1993). To support the occurrence of
discourse among students in a classroom, several computer-based discussion tools are
now being used. Tools such as CSILE (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1994), WebSMILE
(Guzdial, 1997), and Speakeasy (Hoadley & Linn, 2000) provide opportunities for
asynchronous discussions. These tools have been found to help students to delve deeper
into important scientific issues (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1994), to provide more
scientific justifications for their designs (Puntambekar, Nagel & Kolodner, 1997), and to
generate conceptually richer elaborations (Hsi & Hoadley, 1997). In addition, tools have
also been used to foster synchronous collaboration as students engage in design or
inquiry. Tools such as Progress Portfolio (Loh et al., 1998), Sensemaker (Bell & Davis,
1996) and the Group Design Diaries (Puntambekar et al., 1997) support student learning
by providing prompts that enable them to think about the processes and reflect on their
learning, while at the same time they encourage dialogue among groups of students
interacting with the tools. The Collaboratory Notebook used in the CoVis project

15

(Edelson, Gomez, Polman, Gordin, & Fishman, 1994) provides students with a
collaborative environment and supports scientific reasoning and inquiry skills. Classroom
events such as Pin-up sessions and design discussions (Kolodner et al., 2002) enable
students to share, review and critique design ideas. As students engage in dialogue and
negotiation in a knowledge building discourse (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994), the more
knowledgeable peers contribute by raising important issues, pointing to resources and by
providing clarifications. Less knowledgeable members play an important role by bringing
up questions and asking for clarifications.

Since students learn at different rates in a complex learning environment, within multiple
zones of proximal development, tools, resources, and artifacts are being used as scaffolds
in addition to the adult (teacher) or a more capable peer. Tools and resources are not only
useful for promoting dialogue and interactions, but for demonstrating relevant aspects of
the task or strategies and making covert processes visible (Collins, Brown & Newman,
1989; Linn, 1998). For example, students learning in a design-based classroom require
guidance for the several activities that they need to carry out in order to successfully
complete a complex task. In a learning by design classroom, designing provides students
with motivation and rich affordances for learning and applying science content. However,
it is not always easy for middle-school students and teachers to participate in and learn
successfully from design activities. Design is a complex process, encompassing many
skills and activities. Students need support to successfully execute the various activities
involved in designing analyzing the situation to understand the problems and issues that
need to be addressed, gathering information, generating alternative solutions, generating

16

criteria to evaluate solutions, thinking about trade-offs, and justifying choices. Similar
challenges are present in a project-based or a problem-based classroom. In such
environments, software or paper tools are increasingly being used to provide procedural
scaffolding so that the teacher is free to provide conceptual scaffolding (Bell & Davis,
1996). These tools are designed to provide students with assistance as they work on their
own or in small groups, on complex problems that they are unable to solve on their own.
Tools can provide students with support for solving problems, for the processes in
completing an activity or for understanding the domain.

For example, based on the scaffolded knowledge integration framework, the Knowledge
Integration Environment, KIE, (Linn, 1998), consists of a suite of tools to help foster
knowledge integration by developing skills such as reflection, critiquing and using
evidence to develop an argument. KIE supports the scientific inquiry process by making
thinking visible (Linn, 1998). One of the tools from KIE, the Sensemaker, helps students
to develop scientific arguments by scaffolding the process of constructing an argument.
Sensemaker makes the process visible and encourages students to reflect on the process.
In addition, it also allows for peer-to-peer scaffolding as students working on the joint
construction of a Sensemaker argument often engage in productive discussion(Bell,
1997). Another component of KIE is the scaffolding provided by the online guidance
system, Mildred. This tool provides students with scaffolding at four levels the big
picture, what to do, how to do it and things to think about. Prompts in KIE include
activity hints (specific prompts to help students in making decisions), evidence hints as

17

well as metacognitive/self monitoring hints. Such hints and questions are important as
students reflect on their own or to promote dialogue when students work in small groups.

Another tool, the Design Diary (Puntambekar & Kolodner, 1998; 2002), is a paper-and
pencil tool that has been used in the Learning by design (Kolodner et al., 2002)
classrooms. The Design Diary has pages associated with the major activities and products
of the design process. Each page in the Design Diary has prompts to help students carry
out its associated design step and write down important information. For example, during
problem understanding, students are asked to restate the problem in their own words.
Prompts for choosing between alternative solutions ask them to identify the criteria
against which they would evaluate possible solutions and to state why they thought these
criteria were important. The diaries also have, on some pages, examples of good and notso-good responses as models of what students are to think about and articulate. Prompts
in the diaries help students to reflect on their design activities and articulate their thought
and ideas.

Opportunities for feedback and reflection are also provided in the SMART environment
(Vye et al., 1998). STAR LEGACY (Schwartz, Lin, Brophy, & Bransford, 1999)
provides a visual representation of the learning cycle to help students with the steps
involved. This representation, according to Schwartz et al., is designed to help both
students and teachers understand where they are in the learning cycle. After reviewing the
initial challenge in video format, this cycle leads students through the processes of
generating ideas, considering multiple perspectives, researching and revising, testing their

18

knowledge as they learn, and finally going public. In addition, the look ahead and reflect
back option allows students to revisit the learning context and learning goals.

The scaffolding in some of the examples discussed above is blanket scaffolding (i.e., it
is same for all students). In addition, the prompts are fairly passive and do not respond to
the changing skill levels of the learner. A slightly more interactive approach can be found
in tools such as Model-It based on the learner-centered design (LCD) approach
(Jackson et al., 1998). In this environment, three types of scaffolding are provided
reflective scaffolding, intrinsic scaffolding and supportive scaffolding. Reflective
scaffolding promotes reflection on the task by providing prompts. The last category, taskfocused scaffolding, supports the learner by changing the task itself, by making the
advanced features of the task unavailable. Supportive scaffolding refers to specific help
that the students are provided to complete the task examples, what to do next hints, etc.
Fading of scaffolding is accomplished by a simple mechanism a stop reminding me
button that the student can choose when she does not need the hints, i.e., fading is not
automatic but has to be explicitly initiated by the student.

Fading is achieved in Ecolab (Luckin, 1998) by using a learner model and varying the
amount of control based on the systems beliefs about the childs learning. However, in
most other environments described in this paper, the scaffolds are permanent and
unchanging. Moreover, the scaffolding provided by tools and resources typically assist
students with the procedural aspects of an activity, or help them reflect and articulate. As
mentioned earlier, in contrast to the scaffolding provided by an expert, the scaffolding in

19

tools is passive, and in most cases is uniformly presented to all learners regardless of their
ability, specific difficulties, or situational variations.

Tools have also been designed to scaffold the task itself. In her Eco-Lab2 environment,
Luckin (1998) has implemented task-focused scaffolding by varying the difficulty of the
activities and by varying the complexity of the environment itself. Jackson et al.s (1998)
intrinsic scaffolding also provides scaffolding for the task, by making the complex
aspects of the task unavailable to novice learners. Burton, Brown & Fischer (1999)
discuss a paradigm that they call Increasingly Complex Microworlds, in which a
student is exposed to a sequence of environments (microworlds) in which the tasks
become increasingly complex. While it may be argued that task-focused scaffolding is in
some ways similar to the Skinnerian concept of shaping the major difference is that
within each task, a learner may be scaffolded within his or her ZPD so that the learner
is provided with support as well as the challenge to complete the task (Roehler &
Cantlon, 1997).

Many of the current approaches focus on scaffolding the processes that students need to
understand better in order to learn successfully in a complex environment. This is
significantly different from the scaffolding that an expert might provide to a single
student as discussed in the early approaches to scaffolding. Whether in the early parentchild studies or in teacher-student studies, or in the apprenticeship studies where an
expert modeled a skill for novices, a key aspect of scaffolding has been the fact that the

Although we have included Ecolab in this discussion, we would like to note that Ecolab provides
scaffolding within the ZPD of the learner and also fades the scaffolding based on a learner model.

20

adult or the expert is also the domain expert. However, many current tools built for
scaffolding focus on helping students move forward with their projects and activities, by
providing them with options about what to do next, providing hints relating to those
options and by helping them reflect on their learning. One of the exceptions to this
approach is the BGuILE environment that provides domain-based scaffolding to help
students investigate the different aspects of a complex phenomenon. As described by
Reiser et al. (2001), BGuILEs software tools explicitly represent domain specific
theories and strategies in ways that guide students inquiry processes and emphasize
general, epistemological goals for their inquiry products.

Recent approaches have also examined the role of the teacher as a facilitator of small
groups as well as the whole class, as critical to successful learning in complex
environments. A teacher leading a whole class discussion has to take into consideration
a whole group of students who are at varying places in their learning (Hogan, 1997).
These whole-class discussions might happen during several key stages throughout the
course of a unit (Puntambekar & Kolodner, 2002). Very often, the kinds of experiences
that students have in small groups are very different for each group, depending on their
investigation paths and the specific stage at which the teacher interacts with them (Tabak
and Reiser, 1997). This means orchestrating the classroom in ways that ensures that
individual or small-group work that students might do be formally used in whole-class
discussions, and that there be more opportunities for small groups to share with the class
the ideas they are formulating or testing. In their analysis of interactions in socioconstructivist classrooms where teachers followed the literacy cycle to help students learn

21

to read and write, Roehler and Cantlon (1997) have described the types of scaffolding
that teachers provide during learning conversations. They found that teachers offer
explanations, invite student participation, verify and clarify student understandings,
model desired behaviors and invite students to contribute clues about how to complete
the task. Hogan & Pressley (1997) described the teachers role within a community of
inquiry as being not so much to execute a set of specific strategies, but rather to
organize the learning environment to establish an underlying culture that centers around
thinking together with students. They have summarized ten types of teacher statements
that can prompt student thinking: Framing a problem or articulating a goal, encouraging
attention to conflicts and differences of opinion, refocusing the discussion, inviting
interaction of ideas, prompting refinement of language, turning question back to its
owner, communicating standards for explanations, asking for elaborations, clarifications
and finally restating or summarizing student statements. The teacher therefore plays a
crucial role in making students private learning opportunities public and in moving them
from local to global understanding (Tabak and Reiser, 1997).

It is therefore clear that in a complex environment of the classroom, not all of the
scaffolding can be provided with any one tool or person. Support is now being provided
in multiple forms. Puntambekar & Kolodner (2002) have discussed the notion of
distributed scaffolding, to describe the support that is provided in multiple forms by many
tools and agents that play a role in learning (for example - the teacher, peers, software
and paper and pencil tools). To help students learn successfully in a classroom, a system
of scaffolding is required that integrates the activities that students have to carry out. Such

22

a system is indeed valuable for supporting classroom communities learn better. However,
not all the support provided by a tool or resource can be called scaffolding. If we do that,
then we have overlooked some of the key elements of scaffolding.

Evolved notion of scaffolding: What have we gained and what have we

missed?

As the discussion in the earlier sections points out, the notion of scaffolding has evolved
since its original conception, and has changed considerably in the last decade. While
recent approaches have helped us understand the kinds of support that we need to design
to help classroom communities learn successfully, there have also been some aspects of
scaffolding that have been difficult to achieve because of the reality of scaffolding in a
classroom. Therefore, as we move towards implementing learning environments based on
social constructivist theories, it is important to examine this change and to consider what
is unique about, and what we are missing in the current implementations of scaffolding.

Our understanding of helping students learn in an interactive environment of a classroom

is now substantially enriched. While there might have been limitations to the types and
amount of scaffolding that a single individual can provide to a whole class of students,
recent approaches have been instrumental in broadening the scope by designing multiple
modes by which support can be provided. Tools such as those described in the previous
section have been designed to provide support to individual students and small groups as
they engage in complex activities. These approaches have also helped us understand the

23

different types of support that students need in order to learn successfully in complex
environments. Tools and environments that provide domain specific, procedural,
metacognitive as well as reflective scaffolding have been designed, providing an array of
methods for helping students learn in a socio-constructivist classroom. Software tools that
force students to encounter important ideas (Reiser, 2002) have helped externalize
processes and representations that would otherwise be tacit.

Scaffolding has also evolved to include a careful orchestration of the environment both
software environments as well as the classroom environment. In the traditional use of the
metaphor, there was an emphasis on scaffolding the learner. However, as the learning
sciences community designs complex environments to help students learn, there has been
a realization of the need to provide not only learner-focused scaffolding but also taskfocused scaffolding (Luckin, 1998), where the task or the activity itself is varied based on
the current state of the learner. Approaches such as pin-up sessions, presentations by
groups of students to share their ideas, and prompting and questioning by teachers have
helped in establishing a culture of questioning and negotiation that can serve as a
powerful tool for learning. Moreover, the notions of distributed scaffolding, and the
complementary roles played by the tools, small group and whole class interactions and
teacher-led discussions have provided promising new directions for designing scaffolding
for a community of learners.

However, in many instances which are now being described as scaffolding, there seem to
be some critical aspects of scaffolding that we may have overlooked, since we are now

24

more concerned with designing scaffolding for a whole class of students or for a
community of learners. To the extent that scaffolding is based on knowledge of the task
and the difficulties that students have, and to the extent that tools, resources and activities
can be built to support student learning, we have been successful in addressing the
difficulties that students have by building tools and resources. However, if the tools that
we have built are permanent and unchanging, they can be described as permanent
supports (Roehler and Cantlon, 1997) tools that help provide structure and
consistency, by highlighting the aspects of the tasks that students should focus on. While
this is by no means trivial, we would like to emphasize that a support becomes a
scaffold only when it is adaptive, based on an ongoing diagnosis of student learning and
helps students to eventually internalize the knowledge and skills and gain control of their
learning. We therefore need to move forward and examine what we have missed so that
we can design effective scaffolding. We have summarized four elements of scaffolding
that have changed as we have moved toward scaffolding classroom communities.

First, the original notion of scaffolding focused on helping the learner in her ZPD, which
required an ongoing diagnosis of the learners changing knowledge and skills. As we
look at implementations of scaffolding in the classroom, where peers scaffold each other
or the scaffolding is embedded in the software or other tools, we find that this critical
aspect of scaffolding is difficult to achieve. The ongoing assessment that is so critical to
providing the right amount of support so that the learner is challenged as well as
supported is not accomplished by designing blanket scaffolding in which all learners
get the same scaffolding, contradicting the very notion of scaffolding.

25

Second, as we move the notion of scaffolding into the classroom, the dynamic and
adaptive support provided to an individual learner by a more capable adult is no longer
available. Although peers may scaffold each other to some degree, they do not
necessarily think about intentionally attuning their support to the changing level of
understanding of their partners or other members of the group. One of the most important
characteristics of scaffolding is the bi-directional, dialogic nature. Although dialogue is a
critical part of peer interactions, the dialogue may not be focused on adjusting the support
that one student might provide to another. Rogoff (1990) pointed out some interesting
shortcomings in the sensitivity and effectiveness of the scaffolding provided by peers as
opposed to adults. She maintains that peer interactions may encourage exploration,
performance and can provide motivation; in a classroom environment, peers can be
critical of each other and force each other to think. Expert-novice interactions on the
other hand, are marked by an assessment of the partners level of competence so that
support can be tailored to her specific needs, which is not possible in peer interactions. It
is therefore difficult to provide the adaptive and dynamic support that is tailored to every
individual in a classroom situation. Tools can help to some extent; however, software
support with the exception of some tools is not necessarily adaptive.

Third, good scaffolding implies that the student is now able to perform the tasks on her
own, and there is a transfer of responsibility from the scaffolder to the scaffoldee.
This aspect of scaffolding has perhaps been overlooked in the many environments that
we discussed in the earlier section. Because of the passive nature of the prompts and the

26

reality of learning in a real classroom, it is indeed difficult to assess whether there has
been a transfer of responsibility and students have in fact gained the knowledge and the
skills that were being scaffolded. Although a lot of the work in the classroom might be
done in a group, it is important to understand what students have learned, in order to
understand the effectiveness of the tools, or the curriculum. Brown et al. (1993), based on
Rogoff (1990) prefer to use the term mutual appropriation instead of internalization to
emphasize the multidimensional nature of the interactions in a classroom embodying the
communities of learners approach. In such an environment, there is collaboration,
interaction and negotiation, and students learn from each other. Brown et al. argue that
the appropriation of ideas in such an environment is multidirectional and there are
multiple zones of proximal development in which students learn at different rates and
appropriate ideas and skills based on their current zones of proximal development at any
given time. The notion of mutual appropriation suggests that students will appropriate
ideas based on their ZPDs, but for scaffolding to be successful, we argue that it is
important to understand the extent of such appropriation.

Fourth, in many of the systems described in the earlier section, the scaffolding that is
provided is based on an analysis of the process. Students are given support, many a time
procedural support, to help them with the subgoal or activities that are necessary to
complete a task. As we understand from the earlier notion of scaffolding, when an adult
or an expert scaffolds a learner, the dialogue that ensues is based in the domain or the
subject matter that the student is learning, because the adult in most instances is also a
domain expert. The same is true of apprenticeship situations when, for example, a novice

27

is learning by observing the master weaver (Greenfield, 1999). This may not occur in a
classroom community, although some students might come with more knowledge about
the domain than others might. Opportunities where a teacher/expert can provide more
domain specific support therefore need to be built in. In addition, domain-specific support
such as that provided in the BGuILE environment is critical for helping students gain a
deeper understanding of the subject.

Thus, although the notion of scaffolding has evolved and our understanding of providing
support in multiple formats is now enriched, we need to think about the critical elements
that we are missing, such as the ongoing diagnosis of student learning, the careful
calibration of support, providing more domain-specific help and transfer of responsibility.
In the next section, we present some suggestions to address these issues.

Moving forward with scaffolding classroom communities

As indicated in the beginning of the paper, our aim in this paper is to discuss how the
notion of scaffolding has evolved and to initiate dialogue to explore the aspects of
scaffolding that we need to further research. Therefore, in this section we present some
directions that we need to consider to design and implement scaffolding in complex
learning environments. These are by no means exhaustive and we invite the learning
sciences community to continue the dialogue about other directions.

28

Shifting the focus of ongoing diagnosis to the group as a unit: In many of the approaches
discussed earlier, students work in small groups to solve a problem, work on a project or
design an artifact. The support provided in the examples discussed earlier, is designed to
help groups of learners as they engage in a complex task. As such, the focus of ongoing
diagnosis needs to shift to the group as a unit. When students interact with each other in a
group, we find that the more able ones support the less able learners and the tools and
resources facilitate this. The adult or the teacher who would otherwise have been engaged
in a one-on-one interaction with a student now has to interact with the group and keep
track of the groups progress over a period of time. This will enable her to understand
whether the group is indeed moving forward, and provide opportunities for the teacher to
find out about group members misconceptions if any. As the teacher monitors different
groups in the class, the common misconceptions across groups might also be recognized
and brought up in whole-class discussions. In addition to misconceptions, the new
insights that some of the groups might attain can also be shared with the whole class. One
of the examples that come to mind in monitoring the progress of the groups is the case of
the sponges described by Scardamalia and Bereiter (1994). While students were
engaged in online discussions, one student posted a response about the three ways of
reproduction in sponges, and a discussion about deeper issues of evolution followed, with
an insight into the structural simplicity of sponges and its relationship to the reproductive
processes. Although this is a great example of peers learning from each other, a teacher
monitoring this discussion can bring it to the notice of the whole class. The role of the
teacher in monitoring the progress of groups and bringing group ideas to the attention of
the whole class is now critical. As one teacher recently pointed out to us after each class

29

I keep a journal of where my different groups are in terms of their learning and
understanding so that I can start the next days work with a discussion of the difficulties
or any new ideas that came up. Another way in which we are trying to help understand
where the groups are in terms of their understanding is by using computer generated log
files of students navigation paths (Kulikowich & Young, 2001). By analyzing the
navigation paths as students traverse through an online resource designed to help students
understand the relationships among concepts (Puntambekar, Stylianou and Jin, 2001),
and looking for patterns, a teacher can be alerted to unique aspects that stand out. We are
working on a system where the teacher can be alerted to the most frequently visited
concepts, most frequent transitions, unusually long or short amounts of time spent on
concepts, etc. The teacher can then integrate these observations with the progress of
groups in the classroom and she can then use all of the observations to guide whole class
discussions or small group facilitation. Ways to keep track of the dialogue among groups,
such as using an online discussion tool, or capturing group conversations, can help a
teacher as well as a researcher examine a groups progress over time and analyze whether
students dialogue shows an increasing depth of knowledge.

Building Redundancy and Fading: According to Rogoff, (1999), one way to provide
scaffolding is to make the messages sufficiently redundant so that if a child does not
understand one aspect of the communication, other forms are available to make the
meaning clear. In her studies of weavers in Mexico, Greenfield (1984) also emphasized
the importance of the multimodal assistance that mothers provided to their daughters who
were learning to weave. In the complex environment of the classroom, there are multiple

30

ZPDs that teachers/researchers have to take into consideration while building scaffolding.
It is not possible for one person to provide support for the multiple students learning at
different rates within their ZPDs. Building redundancy can therefore make up for the lack
of graduated assistance if multiple ways and multiple levels of scaffolding are tailored to
the multiple ZPDs that are found in any classroom. When scaffolding is provided in
multiple formats, there are more chances for students to notice and take advantages of the
environments affordances. For example, recognizing the need to reflect is particularly
difficult when students are working hard on a hands-on activity (indeed, taking time to
reflect is hard for anybody in the flow of working on an exciting hands-on activity).
Paper-and-pencil and electronic scaffolding cannot help students recognize that need;
rather, they seem to need to be interrupted from their activities to think about what they
are doing. When scaffolding is distributed across tools and agents in the environment in a
systematic way, such difficulties can be dealt with from a variety of perspectives
(Puntambekar & Kolodner, 2002). Multiple opportunities are important too. Students
who fail to understand a prompt in a paper or software tool may need another opportunity
to be scaffolded during a small group session when a peer asks the same question that is
in a prompt but uses different words or during a whole-class discussion when another
student explains how he/she accomplished some task.

An issue to consider while building redundancy is to build tools that not only provide
support for the process, but also provide scaffolding for a specific domain. Tools and
resources (e.g. Digital library, CoMPASS) may be integrated into the environment that
can help students with their domain related questions. CoMPASS (Puntambekar, 2000)

31

provides conceptual support by using dynamic concept maps that show the relationships
among concepts. It enables students to see a particular concept or principle through many
different views, enabling them to understand the multiple relationships among concepts.

Inherent in the notion of scaffolding is the goal that students will be capable of
independent activity when the scaffolds are removed. Closely coupled with the ongoing
diagnosis of learning is the notion of fading scaffolding as students become more
independent and capable of taking responsibility for their learning. Our aim in designing
support is to ascertain that students learn the necessary domain and skills and are able to
generalize them to other contexts.

An important aspect of scaffolding in a classroom is that it is hard to achieve the kind of

adaptive support eventually leading to fading that is possible in a one-on-one situation. In
the reciprocal teaching studies, students took responsibility for leading the group
discussion as they developed the skills. Another example is the system MIST
(Puntambekar & du Boulay, 1997) in which the system keeps track of the learning paths
of pairs of learners and advises one to support the other based on these paths. Although
these systems are a step in the direction of providing more adaptive support, we need to
find other ways of achieving adaptivity so that students of all abilities receive the
scaffolding that they need. By building redundancy into the scaffolding, and designing
tools with multiple layers of scaffolding such as in Ecolab (Luckin, 1998), and designing
the environment with a suite of such tools, some adaptivity and fading can be achieved.

32

We would like to go back to Wood et al.s original description of a theory of the task
and a theory of the tutee, as crucial to building effective scaffolding. In order to build
tools based on multiple ZPDs (theories of the multiple tutees), we need to conduct
extensive studies of the difficulties that students have in a particular situation and revise
that knowledge as we move forward. If different types of scaffolds are built based on the
multiple ZPDs that are found in a classroom, then as students make progress, some of the
scaffolds may be removed, thereby achieving fading.

Engineering the classroom environment for successful learning: The biggest challenge
that we face is the orchestration of the tools and activities so that the affordances of each
are taken advantage of. Although studies involving distributed scaffolding are a step in
the direction, we need more studies about what works and what does not in a classroom
environment. In a complex classroom environment, it can be difficult to align all the
affordances in such a way that students can recognize and take advantage of the many
affordances. Effective scaffolding therefore needs to be distributed, integrated, and
multiple, so that students have more chances to notice and take advantages of the
environments and activitys affordances. This requires a careful engineering of the
whole environment and the multiple agents therein: teachers, tools, resources, peers and
the curriculum.

As we move forward, we need to design more ways for peer interactions and weaving in
whole class activities and small group interactions so that they complement each other,
and provide opportunities for dialogue and interactions. One way to achieve more

33

dialogue is to include many opportunities for whole class discussions or group reviews
such as pin-up sessions. Pin-up sessions enable students to present their ideas, models,
and designs in progress, and whole-class discussions at strategic times in the
orchestration, help to bring issues to the attention of all the students in the class. For each,
it is extremely important to decide on appropriate points when they should be held, and
the kinds of presentations and discussions that should be their focus.

Brown and Campione (1994) and Brown et al. (1993) discuss the role of the teacher in a
classroom that is functioning as a community of learners and is engaged in guided
discovery as consisting of a delicate balance between guidance and discovery, where the
teacher has to constantly make judgments about when to intervene.
The successful teacher must continually engage in on-line diagnosis of student
understanding. She must be sensitive to current overlapping zones of proximal
development, where certain students are ripe for new learning. She must
renegotiate zones of proximal development so that still other students might be
ready for conceptual growth.If students are apprentice learners, the teacher is
the master craftsperson of learning whom they must emulate. In this mode, the
teacher models through thought and real experimentation (Brown et al. 1993,
p. 189).

As we move forward, we need to better understand effective teaching practices,

especially the kind of support that teachers provide during small group and whole class
discussions in an interactive environment, so that we can build better professional
development activities and scaffolding for teachers.

34

Conclusion

In this paper, we have discussed how the notion of scaffolding has changed as we have
moved into scaffolding classroom communities. As Palincsar (1998) pointed out,
scaffolding is a very accessible metaphor because it is flexible and it captures multiple
dimensions of teaching and learning, and hence stands the danger of being treated
lightly. We have discussed the main tenets of the original notion of scaffolding and
have examined how the notion has evolved in the last two decades. While it is important
for the notion of scaffolding (or any notion for that matter) to evolve and be enriched, it is
at the same time necessary that we do not overlook the essence of that notion. Although
the current notion of scaffolding has helped us understand ways to build support into
tools and resources, we seem to have missed some of the key elements of scaffolding,
such as ongoing diagnosis, adaptivity and fading. We have discussed some ways in which
these features can be built into scaffolding in a classroom environment. As we design
more tools and resources to scaffold students in a classroom, we need to further
understand what works and what does not work in a classroom. In particular, we need to
conduct longitudinal studies to answer questions such as: What are the tools that work
best in a classroom? How can we design scaffolds that are based on multiple ZPDs found
in a classroom and how can we fade the scaffolds? Are there strategies (or aspects of the
domain) that are best scaffolded by a teacher rather than by a tool? What are the best
ways to scaffold domain knowledge? What are the mechanisms by which we can assess
that transfer of responsibility has occurred? We need to understand better the learning

35

that is taking place during peer conversations, during whole class discussions to be able
to integrate all these activities in a seamless manner.

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