According to Vygotsky, higher
mental functions, including the ability to direct memory and attention in a
purposeful way and to think in symbols, are mediated behaviors. Mediated
externally by culture, these and other behaviors become internalized in the
learner’s mind as psychological tools. In assisted learning, or mediated
learning, the teacher is the cultural agent who guides instruction so that
students will master and internalize the skills that permit higher cognitive functioning.
The ability to internalize cultural tools relates to the learner’s age or stage
of cognitive development. Once acquired, however, internal mediators allow
greater self-mediated learning.
In practical terms, scaffolding
might include giving students more structure at the beginning of a set of
lessons and gradually turning responsibility over to them to operate on their
own (Palincsar, 1986; Rosenshine & Meister, 1992, 1994). For example,
students can be taught to generate their own questions about material they are reading. Early on, the
teacher might suggest the questions, modeling the kinds of questions students might
ask, but students later take over the question generating task.
Research has measured parents’
use of scaffolding while helping fifth-graders with math homework. Researchers
measured the degree to which adults shifted their level of intervention to
fit the child’s zone of proximal development. When the child is having
difficulty, the adult who stays within this region increases his or her directiveness just enough to
provide support but not so much as to take over the task, then reduces
directiveness when the child begins to succeed. Findings revealed that make use of this
principle predicted gains in children’s learning of mathematics. A later
section in this chapter describes reciprocal teaching, a method that uses
scaffolding in just this way. Scaffolding is closely related to cognitive
apprenticeship; experts working with apprentices typically engage them in
complex tasks and then give them decreasing amounts of advice and guidance over
time.
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