Conducting observational investigations of behaviors and processes is an important method for generating scientific knowledge. This article describes a methodology for assisting students in the processes of observational inquiry and theory articulation and its instantiation in a set of digital video tools. We describe a high school biology…

Conducting observational investigations of behaviors and processes is an important method for generating scientific knowledge. This article describes a methodology for assisting students in the processes of observational inquiry and theory articulation and its instantiation in a set of digital video tools. We describe a high school biology…

There has been much interest in using software tools to scaffold learners in complex tasks, that is, to provide supports that enable students to deal with more complex content and skill demands than they could otherwise handle. Many different approaches to scaffolding techniques have been presented in a broad range of software tools. I argue that…

The notion of scaffolding learners to help them succeed in solving problems otherwise too difficult for them is an important idea that has extended into the design of scaffolded software tools for learners. However, although there is a growing body of work on scaffolded tools, scaffold design, and the impact of scaffolding, the field has not yet…

The scaffolding metaphor was originally developed to describe the support given by a more expert individual in a one-on-one interaction. Since then, the notion of scaffolding has been applied more broadly, and it has been transformed and generalized. Most recently, it has been used by researchers in the learning sciences to describe features and…