Differential Effects of Low Versus High Autonomy-Supportive Scaffolding on Students’ Scientific Evaluations and Knowledge Construction

Understanding scientific principles is often challenging for students. Learning difficulties may be enhanced when students reason about the connections between scientific evidence and explanations, particularly in light of popular, but non-scientific alternatives (e.g., often found in socio-scientific topics such as climate change). Instructional scaffolding may facilitate students’ understanding in these situations. Further, autonomy-supportive scaffolding may be especially effective for adolescent students when learning about socio-scientific issues (Medrano et al., 2020). We investigated the differential effects of two scaffold types—low versus high autonomy support—that facilitate students’ evaluations of the connections between scientific evidence and alternative explanations of socio-scientific phenomena. notReviewed other