![]() 2003 Palincsar and Brown 1984 Palincsar et al. 2006) are being used alongside social scaffolds, such as support provided by teachers or peer interactions (Kolodner et al. 2003 Luckin and Du Boulay 1999) and written prompts in paper-and-pencil tools (McNeill et al. Material scaffolds including technology tools (Linn et al. The idea of distributed scaffolding, in which various types of tools, routines, and activities are used to support a range of students, is now being increasingly applied in classroom contexts (Puntambekar and Kolodner 2005 McNeill et al. But support provided by peers and teachers, or social scaffolds, play a crucial role in extending and complementing the support that is provided in tools so that each student’s needs are met (Tabak 2004 Tabak and Reiser 1997 Puntambekar et al. Support provided through tools, or material scaffolds, including instructional materials and technology, fulfills a key function in that all students can move forward on their goals. But very often in classroom contexts, support is the same for all students and is not tailored to each student’s needs for particular tasks in which they are engaged. The original notion of scaffolding assumed that a single more knowledgeable person, such as a parent or teacher, would support an individual learner, providing exactly the help he or she needed to move forward (Bruner 1985). The ZPD describes a range of understanding for a student in which targeted support can balance sufficient challenge for students while preventing boredom and frustration. This difference between what a learner can accomplish alone and with assistance is known as the zone of proximal development, or ZPD (Vygotsky 1980). Scaffolding describes the pedagogical support that is calibrated to a learner’s current level of understanding and helps the learner accomplish tasks that he or she could not accomplish alone (Wood et al. 2001), support or scaffolding is often provided through instructional materials or technology. In classrooms where students work on complex problems or projects (Hmelo-Silver and Barrows 2006 Kolodner et al. Our findings show that the complementarity between responsive scaffolding moves from the teacher and scaffolding embedded in instructional materials is important for effectively supporting the wide range of students’ needs in the classroom. In contrast, the other teacher tended to extend the static kind of scaffolding found in the instructional materials rather than adapt support to his students’ needs as material scaffolds faded his students showed a significant decrease in performance over time. One teacher complemented support provided by the material scaffolds by frequently monitoring students’ understanding and providing additional support as needed, even when material scaffolds faded her students maintained a high level of performance throughout the unit. ![]() Differences in teachers’ responsive versus static scaffolding moves corresponded with differences in students’ performance as material scaffolds faded in support. We focused on how teachers’ scaffolding complemented the fading material scaffolds in a paper-and-pencil tool and how this combination of support impacted students’ learning of science practices and content. ![]() Our study explores the interplay between support embedded in instructional materials and scaffolding provided by teachers. While most material scaffolds in instructional tools are inherently static, teachers can complement support provided in material scaffolds by providing responsive assistance and mediating students’ interactions within their environment to both support and challenge students. Designing learning environments with distributed scaffolding-support distributed across different instructional tools, activities, and the teacher-can help support students’ different needs, but a critical question is how the design incorporates the hallmark feature of responsive support.
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