Learning in the Absence of Direct Supervision: Person-Dependent Scaffolding

© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Contemporary accounts of learning emphasise the importance of immediate social partners such as teachers and co-workers. Yet, much of our learning for work occurs without such experts. This paper provides an understanding of how and why new home care workers use scaffolding to learn and enact safe manual handling techniques in their workplaces, and suggests how their learning may be supported in the absence of direct supervision. A qualitative approach was adopted for this inquiry, in which newly recruited workers were directly observed and interviewed in their workplaces following classroom training. When learning without direct supervision, these workers were found to use the scaffolding in person-dependent ways. They constructed, engaged with, and subsequently dismantled their scaffolding as personally required, rather than relying on their teacher to decide how and when these forms of learning support should be used and withdrawn. Consequently, a range of scaffolds should be provided in the workplaces of these individuals, without rigid stipulations about how and when they are to be accessed. That is, the learners themselves should be encouraged to decide on the type and frequency of their interaction with the scaffolding provided, and to access or withdraw this support as required

Investigating scaffolding during collaborative reading on the tabletop computer

PhD ThesisThis study investigates the scaffolding process and student interaction, from a sociocultural perspective, in a tabletop assisted language learning environment for collaborative reading. The study furthers understanding of features of traditional conceptualizations of scaffolding as a learning construct in the context of technology-mediated social interaction. This scaffolding manifests when learners interact with one another in different user (verbal and non-verbal) modes, and with elements or attributes of tabletop technology during collaborative reading tasks. Tabletop technology is seen to add an extra dimension to the scaffolding metaphor, and this study is an attempt to explore features of this metaphor and how scaffolding is applied in this new learning platform. To achieve this, a design-based approach as adopted, resulting in a multi-touch tabletop application for digital collaborative strategic reading (DCSR). The DCSR application is designed to lead students through several digital reading stages: previewing, brainstorming, prediction, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap-up. DCSR was trialled with four students of English as a second language (ESL) over five instruction sessions. The sessions were video-recorded, and at the end of the five sessions students were interviewed to provide self-reports of their experiences of the learning environment, the nature of assistance they received, and how they viewed their performance in this environment. Analysis of verbal, non-verbal, and system/technical modes of interaction provided an overview of the learning context for examining scaffolding processes and student interaction. Findings reveal a range of interactions (student–student, student–tabletop, and student–tabletop–student interactions). These were brought together under a taxonomy of functions employed to assist the students’ reading comprehension and demonstrate that the tabletop computer can provide scaffolding for reading comprehension via user (verbal and non-verbal) scaffolding strategies and system/technical scaffolding tools.Jazan University