Cultivating students' design abilities can be highly beneficial for the learning of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts, and development of higher-order thinking capabilities (National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council in STEM integration in k-12 education: status, prospects, and an agenda for…

We collected think-aloud, pre-test, post-test, and motivation data from 43 undergraduates to examine the impact of conceptual scaffolds on the fluctuation of certain motivation constructs and use of self-regulatory processes during learning with hypermedia. Participants were randomly assigned to either the No Scaffolding (NS) or Conceptual…

Although writing learning protocols is an effective follow-up course work activity, many learners tend to do it in a rather suboptimal way. Hence, we analyzed the effects of instructional support in the form of prompts. The effects of different types of prompts were investigated in an experiment with four conditions: cognitive prompts,…

This paper examines the role of scaffolding in the process of abstraction. An activity-theoretic approach to abstraction in context is taken. This examination is carried out with reference to verbal protocols of two 17 year-old students working together on a task connected to sketching the graph of |f|x|)|. Examination of the data suggests that…