The scaffold is a perfect metaphor for the work that Bruner et al. Bruner, Wood, and Ross, The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 1976

This scaffolding consists essentially of the adult 'controlling' those elements of the task that are initially beyond the learner's capacity, thus permitting him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his range of competence.

More often than not, it involves a kind of 'scaffolding' process that enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts. Many education specialists wrote about and built on the idea of Vygotsky's 'zone.' In 1976, Bruner, along with his colleagues David Wood and Gail Ross, released a paper on tutoring in which they referred to the mechanisms of moving students through this zone as 'scaffolding':īut the intervention of a tutor may involve much more than this. Students gain knowledge through being guided through this zone. One earlier Soviet scientist, Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, had proposed in one of his works the 'zone of proximal development': that there is a place between not knowing something and knowing something where a child's rich but disorganized and spontaneous concepts of life meet the structure and systems of adult reasoning and logic. He was deeply interested in cognition and learning, and much of his published work focuses on this.Įducation was undergoing massive reform in the 20th century as psychologists like Bruner brought their field to bear on educational techniques. A psychologist, Jerome Bruner is best known now for his contributions to the cognition of learning, and he's considered one of the founding fathers of cognitive psychology. One scientist of the 20th century, Jerome Bruner, made the most of that metaphorical application. Scaffolds are handy things and apt metaphors. The verb scaffold goes back to the 16th century, where it had a more literal meaning: 'to furnish with a stand or scaffold.' The verb gained a number of extended meanings, including referring to hanging tobacco leaves prior to curing them, or figuratively propping something up ('New Titles may be Scaffolded with Laws,' C. Get a vocabulary lesson before school starts.

Scaffold synonym webster