Scaffolding Student Performance of New and Difficult Tasks

As we emphasize the importance of engaging students in more thoughtful and longer term literacy tasks, it is important to provide them with the skills and knowledge to undertake these tasks successfully: Simply changing the kinds of tasks students are asked to do or making them more difficult is not enough to ensure higher achievement. Instead, students need to be provided with appropriate support as they undertake new tasks, support that will allow them to complete the tasks successfully and at the same time gain new knowledge, skills, and strategies that will eventually allow them to undertake such tasks on their own. Our approach to this problem builds on the work of instructional researchers who during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s began to identify and refine the notion of "scaffolding" (Bruner, 1978; Cazden, 1979) that is supportive to language and literacy learning. This involves helping students develop and use their metacognitive and self-regulating capabilities in the English language arts classroom. Here, the role of class members (other students and helpers as well as the teacher) becomes one of providing instructional support or scaffolding that will allow students to undertake new and difficult tasks that they could not do without some assistance (see, for example, Langer & Applebee, 1986; Freedman, 1995; Langer, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lee, 1993, 1995; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Rogoff, 1994).

Through help and discussion, direct teaching, hinting, prompting, and modeling in the course of their own assisted performances, students become aware of how and why the strategies work and how to engage them on their own (see, for instance, Bransford, Brown, & Cocking. 1999). Research on instructional scaffolding has helped to elucidate the various mechanisms through which individuals gain access to the store of cultural knowledge through the social process of interaction and, during the process of engaging in activities within the field, make that knowledge and those enabling skills their own (Vygotsky, 1962, 1986). Our understandings of these mechanisms have been advanced by a variety of researchers (Dyson, 1994; Kamberilis & Bovino, 1999; Lee, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Miller & Legge, 1999) who have stressed that learners are socially skillful cultural beings with roots in families and communities, through which they learn a wide variety of cultural uses of language and literacy.

For teachers, the concept of instructional scaffolding (Langer & Applebee, 1986) provides a way to think about ways to offer students culturally appropriate social as well as metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies and models for undertaking new and more difficult tasks. In completing tasks that are appropriately scaffolded (through carefully constructed materials and activities as well as through interactions with teachers and peers), the needed knowledge, skills and strategies are eventually internalized in useful ways, providing students with the resources to eventually take on similar and even more difficult tasks on their own. Tharp and Gallimore (1988) call this "assisted performance," with the following kinds of assistance offered: modeling, contingency management, feeding-back, instructing, questioning, and cognitive structuring. Thus, students experience not only more demanding expectations and coursework, but gain problem-solving and reasoning capabilities to do well on their own – including knowing when they need help and how to get it.

Langer (1995) similarly describes the "envisionment-building classroom" as one where students are enculturated to engage in more complex tasks. Based on an eight-year study, she identified two types of scaffolding used by teachers and students in "envisionment-building" English classrooms that support students to become more thoughtful readers and writers: 1) ways to discuss and 2) ways to think. One kind of support helped the students become more familiar with discussion and discipline-appropriate interaction routines (such as turn-taking, agreeing, disagreeing, elaborating on each others’ ideas) and the other helped them hone their thinking (by helping them to focus, sharpen their ideas, analyze, and provide evidence for their growing understandings). In these classrooms, the multiple perspectives of peers, teachers, and authors’ voices were used as a spur to motivate students to further explain, examine, argue, justify, challenge, and consider. Diversity was an asset that spurred thinking. Thus, participants became part of a learning community with high expectations about both the content and communication that are part of higher literacy; through their participation in that community the students were provided with specific ways to participate effectively.

In a more recent study that included 88 middle and high school English classes, Langer (1999) found that appropriate scaffolding for difficult tasks was an important feature in distinguishing higher performing classrooms from ones that were more typically performing with demographically similar populations. Students in the higher performing schools and classrooms were provided with strategies for thinking as well as doing: Instruction was not merely procedural, but was designed so that the students would understand how to do well. In contrast, in the more typically performing schools, the focus was on the content or skill without overtly teaching the overarching strategies for planning, organizing, completing, or reflecting upon the content or activity.

Similar findings for the positive effects of providing appropriate scaffolding have been found across a wide range of subject matters and ages. Among the approaches to scaffolding that have been validated in the literature are Palincsar and Brown’s (1984) reciprocal teaching (see Rosenshine & Meister, 1994, for a supportive meta-analysis of experimental studies); Bereiter and Scardamalia’s (1987) procedural facilitation in the teaching of writing; Hillocks’ (1986) environmental mode of instruction in the teaching of writing; Lee’s (1993, 1995) use of culturally specific language routines to support the development of academic literacy; and a variety of approaches to prompted and structured computer assisted tasks in mathematics, science, and literacy learning (see Bransford et al., 1999). In their introduction to the range of work on scaffolding, Bransford et al. (1999) point out that although there remain many issues to be explored, "there is agreement that the new tools make it possible for people to perform and learn in far more complex ways then ever before."

Because it has proven to be a powerful tool in thinking about effective instruction across a wide range of contexts, the use of appropriate scaffolding to help diverse students undertake new and more difficult tasks is an important element of the instructional development activities in the Partnership for Literacy.

A comprehensive reference list is available.