Design And Application Of Scaffolding Supporting Collaborative Learning Activity Under Knowledge Building Theory

In the era of information with rapid growth of knowledge, collaborative learning as an important way of learning has been widely used in education and teaching, and scaffolding as the most effective support for collaborative learning has got more and more attention. However, how to keep learners’autonomy and guide the goal and direction in the process of the collaborative learning is the most difficult research problem in the design of scaffolding.This research with "learning science and technology" course as a case, mainly based on the knowledge building of the twelve principles, combined with Stahl’s and Tim Slaughter’s knowledge building models, attempts to construct including the individual knowledge building, group knowledge building and class knowledge building three collaborative knowledge building process model. In the classroom collaborative learning practice, there are five kinds of scaffolding, including Resource type, Direction type, Proposal type, Interaction type, Evaluation and Reflection type were designed to support individual, group, and class three collaborative knowledge building of the learning activities.This research collected including individual, group and class knowledge building related data with the application of scaffolding in the process, and combining with the comprehensive analysis of teachers and students’ interview and questionnaire data, the results show that:(1)In the process of collaborative learning,scaffolding is helpful to improve the students’ autonomous learning and collaborative learning ability; (2)The Resources Scaffolding and the Proposal Scaffolding in the role is more important than other types of scaffolding in the whole process of collaborative learning; (3)The Direction Scaffolding has significantly help for learners to clear learning objectives, learning content and adjust learning pace; (4)For the Interactive Scaffolding, students prefer face-to-face and online synchronous interaction.Students does not like having discussions on the forum.But in fact, the forum promotes the production of different views although that interactive performance is not strong. By comparison, the mind map has obvious effect to support students’interaction; (5)The evaluation of reflective scaffolding have obvious individual differences.