Getting to Know Me: Helping Learners Understand Their Own Learning Needs through Metacognitive Scaffolding

Software scaffolding has been successfully employed within educational technology to help bridge the recognition-production gap between what learners want to achieve and what they are able to effect themselves without assistance. Such work has however concentrated on scaffolding the learner at the domain level with less attention to the potential for providing explicit support at the Metacognitive level. Evidence from previous work has shown that less able and less knowledgeable learners are especially ineffective at selecting appropriately challenging tasks and seeking appropriate qualities and quantities of support and guidance [1,2]. But how can we make learners more effective at reflecting on their own needs, at seeking appropriate challenges and appropriate support? We have used a participatory design approach to assist young learners in the design process so that they can, in turn, assist us as we develop Metacognitive scaffolding strategies. These strategies have been implemented in Ecolab II. Early results are encouraging and suggest that low ability children can too be scaffolded to greater success.