The Social and Technological Dimensions of Scaffolding and Related Theoretical Concepts for Learning, Education, and Human Activity Roy D. Pea To cite this version: Roy D. Pea. The Social and Technological Dimensions of Scaffolding and Related Theoretical Concepts for Learning, Education, and Human Activity. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2004, 13(3), pp.423-451. hal-00190619 HAL Id: hal-00190619 https://telearn.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00190619 Submitted on 23 Nov 2007 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. THE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 13(3), 423-451 Copyright O 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. COMMENTARY The Social and Technological Dimensions of Scaffolding and Related Theoretical Concepts for Learning, Education, and Human Activity Roy D. Pea School of Education Statlford Urziversity I am perhaps not the only one who feels that the concept of scaffolding has become so broad in its meanings in the field of educational research and the learning sciences that it has become unclear in its significance. Perhaps the field has put too much of a burden on the term, and we need a more differentiated ontology to make progress. Perhaps scaffolding has become a proxy for any cultural practices associated with advancing performance, knowledge, and skills whether social, material. or repro- duciblepatterns of interactivity (as in software systems) are involved. Thls is surely too much complexity to take on at once. Given these burdens at the level of a scien- tific account of learning by the individual. I feel it is premature to be extending scaf- folding considerations by metaphorical extension to the level of a whole classroom of learners oreven to acultural level, as Davis andMiyake (this issue) suggest in their introductory essay. I first see whether I can garner some clarifications and leverage from uses of the term scaffolding for specific instances and classes of its uses by indi- vidual learners (where the articles in ths issue focus their attention). As with many such concepts that are felt to have useful power in theoretical and practical schemes, it will be worthwhile to do some historical excavation, identify and circumscribe the early uses and roots of the concept, and then determine Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Roy D. Pea, School of Education, Stan- ford University, Cubberly Hall, Stanford, CA 94305. E-mail: [email protected] 424 PEA whether in the rich body of work that has developed since its origins roughly 30 years ago one can craft a conceptual map relating scaffolding and its many afili- ated concepts such that the vitality of the issues raised in its initial conceptualiza- tion can be preserved and even extended. My goals for this article were to first provide a personal view on the history of scaffolding and related concepts in its semiotic field and to then develop a frame- work for what I believe to be its definitional core and contrastive terms and the pri- mary issues and opportunities they present for us as learning scientists and educa- tors. I then consider the contributions made and the issues raised in this issue's collection of articles in terms of this framework. Reading the articles themselves will be important for the reader. as my goal is not to review them here but to refer- ence them. Collectively, the four articles by Reiser, Quintana et al., Tabak. and Sherin. Reiser, and Edelson (this issue) provide illuminating conceptualizations that help advance the theory of scaffolding for instructional support, primarily with a focus on lcarning how to do scientilic inquiry in the middle to high school grades. They offer a distinction between "structuring" and "problematizing" mechanisms of scaffolding for student work (Reiser. this issue), a scaffolding de- sign framework encompassing an impressive array of categories around different components of scientific inquiry illustrated with many software systems (Quintana et al.. this issue), the concepts of "distributed scaffolding" and "synergy" between different components of distributed scaffolding (Tabak, this issue), and an analyti- cal framework arguing that scaffolding should be conceived of as a comparative analysis to be performed on learning interactions (Sherin et al., this issue) rather than software features or situations. There is much to be learned from these arti- cles. as they provide a synoptic view of scaffolding research in science learning. I recall first becoming aware of the concept of scaffolding when I was a doctoral student in Jerome Bruner's laboratory on South Parks Road in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University around 1975. The context was one in which a number of graduate students, postdocs, and visiting fellows (including Catherine Urwin, Michael Scaife, John Churcher, Alan Leslie, Chris Pratt, Alison Garton, Renira Huxley. Kathy Sylva, and later visiting students Alison Gopnik and Susan Sugarman) were studying the ontogenesis of language and thought and es- pecially the emergence of syntax from the early protolanguage and single word pe- riod of child language. Yet others were studying imitation, perception, play, and other developmental phenomena. We regularly read papers together. had a lively weekly seminar series, and reviewed and analyzed video data and its interpreta- tions together. The term scaffolding was one introduced by David Wood with Jerry Bruner and Gail Ross in an article published in 1976 and the related idea "in the air" among our Oxford group was one that Jerry called "formats." The notion was that one of the po- tential explanations for how it is that babies acquire meaning in early parent-child interaction is that there are regularly structured situations in which the range of SOCIAL DIMENSIONS 425 meanings is actually quite limited and that these simple formats provide a highly constrained situation in which the child can bootstrap some of the conventions of turn taking and meaning making with words that are required of a language user (e.g., Bruner. 19753, 1975b. 1977). Bruner and Sherwood (1 976) illustrated this line of argument using data from peekaboo interactions between a mother and child. In Wood et al.'s (1976) article, the term scaffolding was first used, and it de- scribes how an interaction between a tutor and a child concerning how to construct a wooden pyramidal puzzle employs "a 'scaffolding' process that enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal which would be be- yond his unassisted efforts" (p. 90). Formats for early language thus provided a form of scaffolding for learning to use words and the acquisition of meaning. In both of these conceptualizations, whether mother-infant interaction in the ser- vice of language development or for the development of the puzzle-solving behav- iorsdescribed in the Wood et al. (I 976) article, the first thing to notice is thatthesitu- ations of learning are neither formal educational nor "designed" in the traditional sense of the term (even ifthe puzzles weredesigned, as Tabak. this issue, notes). Such interactions as wewere studying were ones weconceived to be naturally occurring in an informal context and an expression of one of the socioculturally grounded activi- ties typical of at least some families in Western societies. Needless to say, the scaf- folding achieved in these mother-infant encounters was not computer mediated. The work that the concept scaffolding is intended to do in these psychologists' ac- counts of human development is to bring to one's attention the function that particu- lar behaviors on the mother's part appear to play in enabling the performance of a more complicated act than would have otherwise been possible. In this sense, scaf- folding appears to be an apt turn of phrase as both noun and verb-nowt because it is a structure, guided in specific form by tacit assessment of achild's independentcapa- bilities and needs, andmounted temporarily on the learner's behalf until thechildcan self-sufficiently produce the behavior on his or her own-and verb because scaffold- ingis also aprocess becausedifferent aspects of an activity will need to be scaffolded in the conduct of performance over time unless independent performance is achieved. If the parent continued to do such structuring once the child becomescapa- ble of autonomous activities, one would find it strange. It was also current at the time for our Oxford Group and others such as Wood's group at Nottingham to be reading and thinking about the philosophy of language and accounts more broadly of the psychology and development of language. We were reading attempts by Patricia Greenfield (Greenfield & Smith, 1976), John Dore (1972), Elizabeth Bates (1976), and others to make sense of how it is that in- fants come to speak not only single words but also eventually sentences. So ac- counts of how to do things with words (J. L. Austin). of speech acts (J. Searle), of word meaning-as-use (L. Wittgenstein). and of functional accounts of language in the developmcnt of thinking (Vygotsky, G. de Laguna) were of vibrant interest to us. We wanted to know how the baby cracked the linguistic code and became able to do productive things with words in interaction, and we were unsatisfied with Chomsky's (1 966) nativist account of language acquisition. It is in this vein that the role of Vygotsky's (1978) concept of the zone of proxi- mal development (ZPD) in conceptualizations of scaffolding is noteworthy.