Scaffolding middle school students’ content knowledge and ill-structured problem solving in a problem-based hypermedia learning environment     

Saniye Tugba Bulu  Susan Pedersen 《Educational technology research and development : ETR & D》2010,58(5):507-529

This study investigated the effects of domain-general and domain-specific scaffolds with different levels of support, continuous and faded, on learning of scientific content and problem-solving. Students’ scores on a multiple-choice pretest, posttest, and four recommendation forms were analyzed. Students’ content knowledge in all conditions significantly increased from pretest to posttest. However, the continuous domain-specific condition outperformed the other conditions on the posttest. Although domain-general scaffolds were not as effective as domain-specific scaffolds on learning content and problem representation, they helped students develop solutions, make justifications, and monitor learning. Unlike domain-specific scaffolds, domain-general scaffolds helped students transfer problem-solving skills when they were faded. Several suggestions are discussed for making improvements in the design of scaffolds to facilitate ill-structured problem solving.  相似文献   

Developing a Web 2.0-based system with user-authored content for community use and teacher education     

Lauren Cifuentes  Amy Sharp  Sanser Bulu  Mike Benz  Laura M. Stough 《Educational technology research and development : ETR & D》2010,58(4):377-398

We report on an investigation into the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of an informational and instructional Website in order to generate guidelines for instructional designers of read/write Web environments. We describe the process of design and development research, the problem addressed, the theory-based solution, and the evaluation and testing of that solution. Based on our experience, we then identify sixteen guidelines for future designers and developers of read/write Web-based learning environments. The study demonstrates how read/write Web technologies can be used to address general problems that have intrinsic societal importance; examines implementation of a read/write technology in a real-life context, thereby testing distributed cognitions learning theory; informs the design of similar environments; and provides grounded theory for the design and development of read/write Web learning environments.  相似文献