• Increase class engagement
• Create an opportunity for students to build stronger understanding towards the content (deep learning)
• Increase motivation as students become more proficient
• Encourage student participation
• Promotes independent learning
• Foster collaborative learning

There are no hard and fast rules for how to create a scaffolding activity. A teacher can use common sense, teaching experience, and students’ needs to assess what type of scaffolding and support will be required by the students.

Below are a few examples I have successfully used in many of my subjects.

• Divide the lecture content into mini-concepts. According to Mayer’s segmenting principle, students will be able to store more information if they are able to chunk or combine some pieces of information.
• Summarise the concept using text on lecture slides or an example.
• Add a student activity related to the concept to engage them in creative thinking e.g., applications of the concept learned to real world problems. This results in increased collaboration as students get to work with their peers.

• Include a pre-class activity to understand students’ prior knowledge. 
• Clear instructions with the scaffolded activity to minimise the student’s stress level.
• Administer the scaffolded activity by giving tips, strategies, or cues so that it is connected to the student’s prior knowledge.
• Use techniques to keep students on target e.g., time the activities, allocate time for students’ to share/present their answers to their peers/teacher.
• Include feedback, it can be both teacher feedback or peer feedback.

In this activity, I recommend using facilitative tools such as think aloud and verbalising thinking. For example, you can start a dialogue with the students by asking a question for example “how we could approach the solution?”. You can also start discussing ideas using a mind mapping tool or using Mentimeter with word cloud question type. Cooperative learning is conducted by allocating students to groups, and sharing the instructions during the session for team work. Later, when I visit from table-to-table, I ask for their group strategy to approach the question.

Amara Atif, FEIT

This example is from an Information Systems subject 32557 Enabling Enterprise Information Systems – Autumn 2022. 

Prepare (Pre-class engagement):

Pre-readings in Canvas with interactive H5P activities (2-3) MCQs at the end of each page.

Figure 1: Using H5P in 32557 Enabling Enterprise Information Systems – Autumn 2022 – Module 2

In class (during class engagement):

• Weekly topic “organisational strategy, competitive advantage, and information systems”
• Broken down into mini-concepts/chunks as:
  • Business processes
  • Business pressures, organisational responses, and IT support
  • Competitive advantage and strategic information systems

Figure 2: Segmenting the learning content, 32557 Enabling Enterprise Information Systems – Autumn 2022, Module 2

• Related group activity to mini-concept “Competitive advantage and strategic information systems” as:

When and where to use

This activity can be used before and during the class. It is suitable for introducing threshold concepts, and group work and can be conducted throughout the session.

Time required (approximate per activity)

What tools can you use?

The following technologies in this activity are supported by UTS:

• Canvas
• H5P
• Mentimeter
• Mind mapping tools

Designing an engaging learning environment that deepens students’ understanding of learning content requires instructors to offer students adequate support and effectively structured content.

According to Van de Pol. et al, (2010) learning scaffolding refers to the “temporary support provided for the completion of a task that learners otherwise might not be able to complete”.  In educational psychology, scaffolding instruction as a teaching strategy is used as a tool for students’ ability to reach their learning goals by completing small, manageable problem-solving tasks guided by their teacher and/or engaging with more competent peers. 

The cognitive load theory (Sweller, 2010) explains that segmenting the learning content allows students to remember large amounts of information. The theory takes into consideration that students can receive, process, and remember information effectively if it is presented  in such a way that it does not “overload” their mental capacity.

Therefore, the role of the instructor is to (1) embed scaffolded activities to help students validate their understanding and (2) structure content into manageable pieces of information that helps students to retrieve the knowledge when needed. The availability of interactive technologies such as H5P, instructors can design the learning environment to use the content knowledge in a pedagogically informed way to help students achieve the anticipated learning outcomes and extend their ability to retrieve knowledge when needed.

References

Van de Pol, J., Volman, M., & Beishuizen, J. (2010). Scaffolding in teacher–student interaction: A decade of research. Educational psychology review, 22(3), 271-296.

Sweller, J. (2010). Cognitive load theory: Recent theoretical advances. In J. L. Plass, R. Moreno, & R. Brünken (Eds.), Cognitive load theory (pp. 29–47). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511844744.004