Effective scaffolding requires metacognitive awareness. #metacognition #learning Click To Tweetby Dr. Stephen Chew, Samford University, slchew@samford.edu

Scaffolding learning involves providing instructional support for students so that they can develop a greater understanding of a topic than they could on their own. The concept of scaffolding originated with the work of Vygotsky and was later developed by Bruner. Scaffolding is not simply giving students the answers, but helping students understand the chain of reasoning or evidence that leads to an answer. I argue that metacognition plays a crucial role in effective scaffolding. Without metacognitive awareness, attempts at scaffolding may only create overconfidence in students without any learning. Let’s examine a common scaffolding activity, review sessions for exams.

Early in my career I used to give review sessions until I realized that they weren’t being helpful to the students who needed them most. I gave students old exams to try to answer for their review. Since I change textbooks regularly, there were questions on the old exams on topics that weren’t covered in the current class. I thought the discrepancy would be obvious when students got to those questions, but only the very best students noticed. Most students answered the questions, basically by guessing, completely unaware that we had never covered the topic. In addition, many students would simply read the question and then check the answer to see if they had guessed correctly without trying to reason through the question or using it as an indicator of their degree of understanding. I realized that students hadn’t studied the material before the review session. They were using the session as a substitute for actually studying. Just going through the review session increased their (false) confidence that they had studied without increasing their learning. It was my first encounter with poor metacognition. The issue with a lot of the struggling students wasn’t the content, but their metacognition and study skills, which my review sessions weren’t addressing. So I stopped doing them.

In recent years, though, I’ve thought about bringing them back with changes to address poor metacognition. First, we know that students who most need review sessions are least likely to think they need them, so I would somehow require participation. This is one reason why I believe that brief formative assessments in class, where everyone has to participate, are better than separate, voluntary review sessions. If I were to reinstate separate review session, I might make participation worth a small portion of the exam grade. Second, I would somehow require that students had done their best to study for the exam BEFORE coming to the review session so it is truly a review. Third, the review session would have to induce students to use good study strategies, such as self-testing with feedback and reflection, or interleaving. I might require students to generate and post three good questions they want to know about the material as their entry ticket to the review session. This would require students to review material before the review session and question generation is an effective learning strategy. Finally, I would require students to utilize the feedback from the review to recognize the level of their understanding and what they need to do to improve. I might have them predict their exam grade based on their review performance. All of these changes should increase student metacognition. I’m sure I’d have to experiment with the format to try to figure it out, and my solution may not work for other classes or faculty. It’s never a simple matter of whether or not an activity such as review sessions are a good or bad idea, it’s how they are implemented.

Without metacognitive awareness, scaffolding can backfire. Consider how poor metacognition can undermine other scaffolding activities such as releasing PowerPoint slides of lectures, guided note taking, allowing a formula “cheat sheet” in STEM classes, and allowing students to discard a certain number of exam items they think they got wrong. If students lack metacognition, each of these activities can actually be counterproductive for student learning.