Chapter 14 page 318
Figure 14.2: Two Self-Evaluation Criteria(From White & Frederiksen, 1998, p. 26.)
Scaffolding Strategy Use and Fading Scaffolding Over Time
Effective teachers provide scaffolds to help students learn to use cognitive strategies effectively. As
we have learned in previous chapters, scaffolds are supports that enable students to carry out tasks that
they cannot carry out unassisted (A. Collins et al., 1989; Davis, 2004; Puntambekar & Hübscher, 2005;
Sandoval & Reiser, 2004; Sherin, Reiser, & Edelson, 2004; Tabak & Baumgartner, 2004). Scaffolding for
strategy instruction is support that helps students execute cognitive strategies that they would have
difficulty executing without any help; this helps students learn to use strategies more skillfully (Pea, 2004;
Quintana et al., 2004; Quintana, Zhang, & Krajcik, 2005; Sherin et al., 2004). We will discuss five kinds
of scaffolds to help students learn cognitive strategies: hints, prompts, diagrams, criteria, and feedback.
We will also discuss the importance of fading scaffolds. As we have discussed before, fading scaffolds
refers to providing less and less scaffolding over time until students can execute strategies effectively on
their own, without any assistance.
Hints. When a student is having difficulty using a cognitive strategy, teachers can give hints. Hints
are questions or statements that point students in the right direction of how to use a strategy correctly, but
that stop short of telling or showing students exactly what to do. By giving hints, the teacher tries to give