In educational design literature, we often come across the notion of ‘scaffolding.’ This means that a teacher, coach, or parent have optimized the conditions for a novice to engage in enacting some skill even before they have mastered the skill. These supplementary conditions, by way of auxiliary devices or a helping hand, are akin to the scaffolds that hold up a structure before it can stand alone and, in fact, are used so as to create that stand-alone structure. Once the structure stands, the scaffolds are removed. Bicycle trainer-wheels are often cited as a prime example of scaffolding: Once a child can ride with the trainer-wheels, the wheels are removed — the scaffold is “faded out.” This approach to education is ubiquitous and for the most part works well. However, in certain circumstances we see that the presence of this auxiliary device or support may prevent the learner from grappling with aspects of a problem that are fundamental to building conceptual understanding. For example, when educational designers build technology-enabled activities that have automated features to support the learner, the function that the automation is performing may not be transparent to the learner.
What does it mean for something not to be transparent? And why does it matter?
Transparency, in the context of educational design research, refers to the relationship between the learner and the tools that they are using to accomplish their goals. More precisely, we say that an artifact is transparent when the user has developed an understanding for how embedded features of their tool function so that they can accomplish the task at hand (Meira 1998). It may be that a user can use a tool, such as a set of gears or a pair of scissors, without fully understanding HOW the gears or the scissors do what they do. And this is fine. By contrast, in cases where the tool functions to scaffold critical content, it is of vital importance that the user understands exactly what the tool is doing. Therefore, educational designers must think critically about their tools, how their tools aim to scaffold learning and how the learner is using the tool to learn.
The Reverse Scaffolding pedagogical design framework emerged as we built a technology-based learning activity for algebraic modeling using the number-line. In this activity the Giant travels twice from a point of departure to a buried treasure, each journey consists of unknown “giant steps” and known integers “meters.” These two journeys consist of different combinations of “steps” and meters, thus setting up what amounts to a diagrammatic representation of an algebraic set of two expressions with one variable. Students are to solve this system through diagrammatic reasoning using a set of modeling tools to aid them as they coordinate key aspects of the problem space and “find the buried treasure”.
There are several ways that we could scaffold learning with built-in computational supports, and yet we want to ensure that whatever actions the computer performs are transparent to the learner. We hypothesized that certain computationally enacted scaffolds, such as defining the screen size of a meter or maintaining equivalence of the ‘unknown’ across the model, should only ‘fade in’ once the user has already manually performed these actions and recognizes that this action is a core component of the modeling system. Essentially, we decided that the scaffold should appear only once the user has mentally constructed transparency for that specific core component of the system. So where traditional scaffolding fades out, Reverse Scaffolding fades in; where traditional scaffolding supports learners by doing for them what they do not yet know how to do, Reverse Scaffolding supports learners by doing for them what they do know how to do.
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