Scaffolding students' knowledge integration: prompts for reflection in KIE

Encouraging students to be autonomous is an important goal of the scaffolded knowledge integration framework. Knowledge integration requires students to expand their repertoire of ideas but unless those ideas are reflected upon, they cannot be linked to and reconciled with current ideas. Students are capable of doing this kind of reflection but, many need scaffolding. Scaffolding-here in the form of reflection prompts-can help students be autonomous integrators of their knowledge. This research investigated learning and design questions. It determined whether reflection prompts promote knowledge integration for students working on science projects and investigated the effects of students' different dispositions on their reflection. It explored which characteristics of prompts best support students in knowledge integration. The learning results indicate that prompting students to reflect significantly increases knowledge integration in science projects. Yet similar prompts elicit qualitatively diverse responses from students. Students who focus on their ideas perform significantly better on the end product than do other students who focus on their actions or activities. Furthermore, students who indicate that they understand everything perform significantly worse on the final project than do other students. The design results show that self-monitoring prompts, which encourage planning for and reflection on activities, help students to demonstrate an integrated understanding of the relevant science; while activity prompts, which guide the inquiry process, are less successful in prompting knowledge integration.