Chapter 15 page 376
discuss their own points of view, and the group is directed to reach consensus on the position that is best
supported by the evidence. The students then write a group reporting stating their position and the
arguments that led them to support it. Students also take a posttest on both positions.
Johnson and Johnson (1995) summarized the results of 25 experiments investigating the use of
controversy-based collaborative groups. Participants ranged in age from early elementary through college
and adult. These experiments demonstrated clear positive effects of constructive controversy on mastery of
content, reasoning ability, ability to understand more than one perspective on an issue, motivation, feelings
of liking of group mates, social support of group mates, and self-esteem. Constructive controversy was
found to provide superior results on all these measures in comparison to students working individually and
to students instructed to seek consensus (rather than to argue constructively). Constructive controversy is
also superior on all these measures to debate formats, in which students only try to persuade each other to
change positions (D. W. Johnson & Johnson, 1995).
Scaffolding Complex Tasks
Many students are not ready to undertake complex tasks on their own without assistance. Therefore,
teachers must provide scaffolding to enable students to complete complex tasks successfully. Students learn
through a process of guided participation, in which teachers provide scaffolding that so that students can
perform a task that they could not learn on their own. Scaffolding refers to assistance that is provided to
help students do a task that many students would be unable to do on their own without these this assistance
(Puntambekar & Hübscher, 2005; Quintana, 2004; Sherin et al., 2004). We have discussed scaffolding in a
number of chapters. In this chapter, we will focus on several scaffolding methods that teachers can use with
their collaborative groups, which will enable these groups to succeed at complex tasks. Figure 15.9
provides an overview of the forms of scaffolding we will discuss.
Figure 15.9 Methods of scaffolding complex tasks during collaborative group work
- Preteaching needed knowledge and strategies
- Task decomposition—breaking a task into steps
- Cognitive prompts--posing questions that direct students to use
particular cognitive strategies. - Social and cognitive roles--assigning students to take the lead on
particular tasks such as being group leader, recording the group’s
ideas, or ensuring that the group provides explanations. - Providing hints—responding to students difficulty by giving some
information that can help them through the difficulty - Self-evaluation—Having groups of students evaluate the quality of
their own group processes using criteria that they help design. - Fading scaffolding—over time reducing the level of scaffolding
provided so that students can do more and more of the task on their
own.