Scaffolding Assessments
When building a course and planning assessments, providing structures to help students to complete their work systematically and keep on task can be a significant support to their learning. Scaffolding is one approach that supports students by starting the course with smaller foundational ideas, concepts, tasks, or skills. This gradual development forms a scaffold that allows learners to more capably and confidently complete larger or more complicated assessments as they progress through the course.
Learners benefit from scaffolding in a variety of ways:
- Direction: Learners are provided with a clear sense of where they are going through the course and how they are going to accomplish their work.
- Support: The support that is offered through scaffolding can help to reduce student frustration and anxiety.
- Independence: Through scaffolding, students can be given new levels of independence and self- direction once they have the foundational skills and knowledge that they need.
- Confidence: Because they have built the skills and direction that they need, learners can be confident in moving forward with new tasks and are less likely to become overwhelmed.
- Motivation: The confidence that students feel can also lead to greater motivation to continue with the course and to put in the time and effort that will support their success.
Types of Scaffolding
Depending on what you are teaching and how you plan to teach it, there are two kinds of scaffolding that you can use in your classes: critical thinking, and process scaffolding.
Critical Thinking Scaffolding
When students are focused on developing cognitive skills, critical thinking scaffolding is an effective way to support their learning. Critical thinking scaffolding works from helping students to remember important information to helping them apply it and then finally to finding new ways to make use of it. These steps also mirror the levels that are set out in the cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy.
For instance, to scaffold critical thinking in a nursing class, during the course you might work with students to:
- Remember how to assess a patient
- Understand why different questions are important
- Apply the questions to a client
- Analyse the responses for themes
- Evaluate what the responses mean
- Create an individualized care plan
Process Scaffolding
If students are working on large, complex, or difficult assessments, process scaffolding is focused more on guiding them through the process itself. This might mean guiding students through different aspects of the process or breaking up the process into smaller independent segments.
For instance, if learners are to write a business plan, during the course you might scaffold that work by having them:
- Select an industry or type of business
- Describe their company and what it does
- Identify and select research approaches and sources
- Gather market and competitive data
- Analyse market and competitive data
- Develop a marketing plan and sales strategy
- Write their business plan
Alternately, you might consider having them write individual segments of the business plan across the semester and provide feedback on each one. At the end of the course, all of the segments could be combined into the final report. This approach also allows learners to address any errors, issues, or gaps that were identified in the feedback in their final assessment.
Feedback
Whether you are using a critical thinking or process approach, scaffolding is most effective when connected with constructive feedback. Feedback makes it possible for students to correct any issues and to improve on their work across the course. This also helps to build confidence and reduce anxiety.
Feedback on scaffolded assessments should always be:
- Timely: the feedback should be clearly associated with a recent assessment that is still fresh in students’ minds
- Specific: focused on particular elements of the assessments that went well and those that students can work on
- Constructive: provide students with things they can improve and ways that they can do so
- Future-focused: connecting current feedback to future work helps students to improve in meaningful ways
In the next section we’ll explore methods for grading assessments and providing feedback to your students.