The Social and Technological Dimensions of Scaffolding and Related Theoretical Concepts for Learning, Education, and Human Activity

By Roy D. Pea. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2004

586 citations recorded by the source corpus.

I amperhapsnot theonlyonewhofeels that theconceptof scaffoldinghasbecomeso broad in its meanings in the field of educational research and the learning sciences that it has become unclear in its significance. Perhaps the field has put too much of a burden on the term, and we need a more differentiated ontology to make progress. Perhaps scaffolding has become a proxy for any cultural practices associated with advancing performance, knowledge, and skills whether social, material, or reproducible patterns of interactivity (as in software systems) are involved. This is surely too much complexity to take on at once. Given these burdens at the level of a scientific account of learning by the individual, I feel it is premature to be extending scaffolding considerations by metaphorical extension to the level of a whole classroom of learnersoreven toacultural level, asDavisandMiyake (this issue) suggest in their introductory essay. I first see whether I can garner some clarifications and leverage from uses of the term scaffolding for specific instances and classes of its uses by individual learners (where the articles in this issue focus their attention). As with many such concepts that are felt to have useful power in theoretical and practical schemes, it will be worthwhile to do some historical excavation, identify and circumscribe the early uses and roots of the concept, and then determine THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 13(3), 423–451 Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Subfields: Computer Science Applications, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Human Factors and Ergonomics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c06ba356cf2dbd98ccf4f34113e6bec0935c983

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In Computer Science Applications

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In Human Factors and Ergonomics

Citations in the corpus

Synthesizing Results From Empirical Research on Computer-Based Scaffolding in STEM Education (2016, background): “There has been consensus among researchers that fading is a necessary component of scaffolding; however, few authors include fading in their scaffolding interventions (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989; McNeill, Lizotte, Krajcik, & Marx, 2006; Pea, 2004; Puntambekar & Hubscher, 2005).”
What Needs to Develop in the Development of Inquiry Skills? (2008, background): “The present findings also point to the effectiveness of scaffolding that is introduced and then gradually relaxed (Reiser, 2004; Pea, 2004).”
Distributed Scaffolding: Scaffolding Students in Classroom Environments (2021, background): “They serve as “scaffolds-for-performance,” in that they need to be “used by the learners to be able to deliver the performances that are desired” (Pea, 2004, p. 438).”
Immersive VR and Education: Embodied Design Principles That Include Gesture and Hand Controls (2018, background): “For a history of scaffolding in the learning sciences, see Pea (2004).”
Learning to critique and adapt science curriculum materials: Examining the development of preservice elementary teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (2012, background): “Both of these findings support the argument that supports for preservice teachers need to be faded gradually as individuals are able to complete increasingly more complex aspects of the task on their own (Collins et al., 1989; Pea, 2004).”
Examining Productive Failure, Productive Success, Unproductive Failure, and Unproductive Success in Learning (2016, background): “Finding out what a learner knows and how that knowledge can be used to help them learn new concepts is central to the concept of scaffolding (Pea, 2004).”