Scaffolding students' knowledge integration: prompts for reflection in KIE

Encouraging students to be autonomous is an important goal of the scaffolde d knowledge integration framework. Knowledge integration requires students to expand their repertoire of ideas but unless those ideas are reflected up on, they cannot be linked to and reconciled with current ideas. Students ar e capable of doing this kind of reflection but, many need scaffolding. Scaf folding-here in the form of reflection prompts-can help students be autonom ous integrators of their knowledge. This research investigated learning and design questions. It determined whether reflection prompts promote knowled ge integration for students working on science projects and investigated th e effects of students' different dispositions on their reflection. It explo red which characteristics of prompts best support students in knowledge int egration. The learning results indicate that prompting students to reflect significan tly increases knowledge integration in science projects. Yet similar prompt s elicit qualitatively diverse responses from students. Students who focus on their ideas perform significantly better on the end product than do othe r 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 sel f-monitoring prompts, which encourage planning for and reflection on activi ties, help students to demonstrate an integrated understanding of the relev ant science; while activity prompts, which guide the inquiry process, are l ess successful in prompting knowledge integration.