Supporting Students' Construction of Scientific Explanations by Fading Scaffolds in Instructional Materials

0227557 respectively. Any opinions expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent either those of the funding agency or the University of Michigan. Context-Specific vs. Generic Scaffolds A student’s success at performing a scientific inquiry practice requires both domain specific knowledge and knowledge of the general practice. In this study, we investigated whether providing students with written curricular scaffolds that focus on the content and task (context-specific) or on the practice of constructing a scientific explanation (generic) better supported middle school student in writing scientific explanation where they justified their claims with appropriate evidence and reasoning. To address this research question, we collected data with six teachers and 578 middle school students during the 2004-2005 school year. All six teachers enacted an 8-week standards-based chemistry curriculum, How can I make new stuff from old stuff?, designed to support 7 th grade students in their understanding of chemistry content and scientific inquiry practices. We created two versions of the curriculum, one with context-specific scaffolds and one with generic explanation scaffolds. We then randomly