Scaffolding support through integration of learning material

Abstract

The ever-growing amount of learning material poses a challenge to both learners and teachers. In order to perform a learning task, students often need to search for additional information. Inquiry might be hampered if they do not know what exactly to search for, especially if they lack prior knowledge in a domain. Furthermore, they might need to recall meta-information, e.g., the implicit links between learning resources or the location of an explanation within a document. In addition, their performance in a learning task might suffer from the constant need for further information. As the authoring of learning material is a time-intensive task, reusability of resources in different contexts should be enabled. In this paper, we present the ALMA-Yactul ecosystem, a holistic approach for student-centered integration of learning material. Based on semantic annotations, learners are provided with scaffolding support for retrieving material related to their current study task. This integration of resources is showcased in a variety of applications and domains, such as a plugin for an IDE or an enhanced sketchnoting app. Moreover, we show how Yactul, a gamified student response platform, can benefit from semantic annotations and integration of learning material. Additionally, teachers are provided with semi-automatic annotation support in the popular Office 365 suite to foster the reusability of their content. Apart from presenting the results of its usage in university classes, we also show how high school students without prior knowledge benefitted from this scaffolding support. A significantly better performance in resolving programming-related tasks could be observed compared to a traditional search process. Finally, the ecosystem is evaluated against a state-of-the-art technology integration model.

Active learning pedagogical dimensions: discovering and bridging the pedagogical gaps

“…The inability of learners to solve problems and achieve desired learning outcomes led to the discovery of a pedagogical gap [80]. Material scaffolding depending on the learners' different developmental level is essential to bridge the gap at this level [81]. Plays for the tertiary level have optimal level of difficulty, challenges, and uncertain goal attainment [82].…”

Applying multimodal learning analytics to examine the immediate and delayed effects of instructor scaffoldings on small groups’ collaborative programming

“…Empirical studies have indicated a positive relationship between groups' immediate uptake to scaffoldings and the groups' collaborative experiences or performances. For example, Grévisse et al (2019) used a scaffolding platform to help students integrate relevant materials in a programming environment and examined the effect of the scaffolding. The results showed that compared to the traditional learning process, students actively used scaffolding to increase participation in collaborative programming and highly appraised the scaffolding.…”

“…However, the instructor scaffoldings lead to different effects regarding the immediate uptake (the group completes the ongoing task) and delayed use (the group solves problems after the scaffolding is faded) in CSCL (Barron, 2003;Wittwer & Renkl, 2008). After reviewing literature, we find a lack of mature standard to evaluate the immediate and delayed effect of instructor scaffoldings on collaborative programming (Grévisse et al, 2019;Zheng et al, 2022). Moreover, most previous research have collected and analyzed a single data source (e.g., discourses) to understand the process of collaboration (e.g., van de Pol et al, 2019).…”

From Zero to Python in 10.5 Hours: Building Foundational Programming Skills with Marine Biology Graduate Students and Researchers in an Introductory Workshop Series

“…This progression places increasing responsibility upon the student to take ownership of learning to solve problems while scaffolding provides an appropriate support structure, with the goal of increasing independence in learning (Greening, 1998). Scaffolding also helps learners achieve success beyond their own existing abilities, which is particularly important in subjects where they have no previous experience (Grévisse et al, 2019). Participants in the course were able to access the Jupyter Notebooks in their own time after the class to help facilitate the learning process both through review and additional experimentation.…”