Scheduling Scaffolding: The Extent and Arrangement of Assistance During Training Impacts Test Performance

ABSTRACT

Various kinds of assistance, including prompts, worked examples, direct instruction, and modeling, are widely provided to learners across educational and training programs. Yet, the effectiveness of assistance during training on long-term learning is widely debated. The authors examined how the extent and schedule of assistance during training on a novel mouse movement task impacted unassisted test performance. Learners received different schedules of assistance during training, including constant assistance, no assistance, probabilistic assistance, alternating assistance, and faded assistance. Constant assistance led to better performance during training than no assistance. However, constant assistance during training resulted in the worst unassisted test performance. Faded assistance during training resulted in the best test performance. This suggests that fading may allow learners to create an internal model of the assistance without depending on the assistance in a manner that impedes successful transfer to unassisted circumstances.

Keywords:

• scaffolding
• assistance dilemma
• training
• guidance

Funding

This research was in part supported by National Science Foundation REESE grant 0910218, and Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education Grant #R305A1100060.

Received July 7, 2014Revised December 9, 2014Accepted January 12, 2015