Scaffolding: How Can Internships Help Students?

Have you ever done a really boring internship and wondered why you have to do them? Can they really help you learn anything? I have done Internships where my only work was to arrange papers and browse the internet. I have also done internships where the employer took active interest in training me. So, whether an internship can be beneficial depends on who you are interning under. But if you get into a good internship program, there are certain scientific reasons because of which we can say an internship is more beneficial to students than college education. In this post, we will consider the scientific reasons.

Internships can be very beneficial to students because of something called scaffolding. In scaffolding, a more experienced professional helps students develop their skills by helping them solve problems in a real life context. Contrary to the traditional teaching methods, students who learn through scaffolding develop independent thinking, can see the larger context in which the skills apply, and understand how the different skills work together to solve the problem. Since they focus the approach on more than just generating and memorising the correct answer, the students will be able to come up with their own innovative solutions.

What is Scaffolding?

Scaffolding refers to the process by which a learner can perform tasks too complex for their current level, with the help of someone more knowledgeable on the subject. In scaffolding, a more knowledgeable person guides the problem-solving of the student to minimise mental burden, rookie mistakes, and to help them with strategic thinking. This is arguably more efficient than the traditional teaching methods used in schools because they are now faced with real-life problems and they have to depend on their own knowledge along with the help of their teacher to solve this problem. Contrary to this, traditional schools focus on teaching the concepts first and students only face real-life problems upon graduation. We will discuss more about the advantages and disadvantages of this approach later on.

The basic idea behind scaffolding is to help the student bridge the gap between the current knowledge and the more sophisticated practices are required in real life. A new learner will have several aspects of skill and knowledge that needs to be bridged. Learners may have an incomplete definition of the problem, may not be able to determine the goal of the task, the expected products, or the resources involved. Their relevant skill set may be incomplete. Therefore, the teacher in this case will regulate some aspects of the problem-solving that may be too advanced for the student and let the student figure out the rest for them self. But the process is not as simple as it seems because if the teacher is going to solve the problem for the student, how will it help the student learn? To understand this, we need to understand how scaffolding works.

How Does It Work?

Scaffolding starts with what we call “the zone of proximal development”. This refers to a range of tasks that are outside of the learners’ current independent ability but are achievable with appropriate help, thereby extending their range of independent activity. But this also means that the teacher must know the learner’s current abilities and what kind of help to provide in order to promote independent learning. It would be very hard to determine where the student needs help and where they can perform independently unless you are very familiar with the student. Therefore, it wouldn’t be uncommon to have mentors who are unable to properly guide you. But the first job of the instructor would be to determine the zone of proximate development of the student.

While considering the zone of proximal development, the mentor must also make sure that the task provided is not so easy that the student can perform it with their current a level of skill. In fact, the task provided to the student must be of the difficulty slightly about their current level and the mentor must present it to them as if they already have the necessary skill available. Since in reality they do not possess the knowledge and skills necessary to complete the task, they are forced to construct an understanding of the relevant knowledge and skills. The understanding they build is further developed by having the mentor perform the required skill in front of the student or by guiding the thinking or actions of the student. Over repeated interactions, the student will start imitating the actions of the mentor or automatically follow the required actions without any guidance.

The trick to find a balance between a task that is too difficult and a task that is too easy is to understand that the aim of scaffolding is to balance the students participation in active problem solving, building both expertise and confidence, while minimising the motivational and cognitive cost of floundering and failure. By having the mentor work on the more difficult element of the problem, the student can develop their understanding by working on simpler tasks. For example, if a student has the task of solving a mad problem, the teacher will solve the most troublesome parts of the problem and allow the student to solve the parts that are appropriate for his level. By doing this, the teacher can reduce the cognitive load on the student by determining what strategy would be appropriate to solve the problem, while the student can focus on the arithmetic calculations rather than try to determine what strategy to use to solve the problem.

But scaffolding is not just about finding an answer and then imitating it. Scaffolding needs to go beyond this point and help the student form explanations for why a particular approach is correct. They need to understand the underlying mechanisms at play. This will allow the students to realise that it is not about finding the right answer. It’s about finding the most efficient answer. Using their understanding of the underlying mechanisms, they may even try to generate their own efficient solution instead of just reproducing what they learnt. It is this element of autonomy that completes the scaffolding process.

The influence of autonomy is not just limited to independent thinking. Scaffolding depends on a progressive decrease in the support provided by the mentor. As the student’s knowledge and skill gradually build up, there is a proportional decrease in support from the mentor. Eventually the mentor is supposed to stop helping the student altogether. This helps the student build competence and confidence in his own skill. 

Why is it Better Than Traditional Learning?

Now that we understand how scaffolding works to help a student develop competence, we should now compare the scaffolding system to the method used in our traditional educational institutions.

Modern education is inspired by a model called technical rationality. According to technical rationality, real knowledge lies in theories while skills are more like the passing interest (source). Technical rationality considers skills to be application of theory to solve concrete problems. So it logically follows that a person need to gain knowledge of the theories before they can learn any skill. This creates the idea that theory is superior to skill because theory determines the quality of skill that can be developed(source). But, as we saw above, with the help of the right mentor, you do not need to fully master the theory before you acquire a skill. Generation of skill can go hand-in-hand with acquisition of knowledge. Sadly, this idea is not reflected in modern education institutions.

The influence of technical rationality creates a teaching model where a complex skill is broken down into its component sub skills and these sub skills are taught to the students individually. This idea has its origin in behavioural psychology. The idea is that complex behaviours can be acquired by learning simple behaviours. Based on this idea, education institutions focus on teaching simpler sub skills, hoping that the student will eventually develop the more complex skills. This method is in exactly inefficient, but it creates the same drawback we saw with drilling. When the teaching is focused on the subskills, it will not reflect actual tasks outside of the learning environment. The student mostly engages with the theory as the teacher teaches it and is unable to think for them self in an actual problem solving environment. Contrary to this, in scaffolding, the student engages with the problem in a real-life setting and with the help of their mentor, they have to develop their own solution to the problem. They learn how different skills should work in concert and when and how they should be applied, which facilitates their independent thinking and appropriate use in the future.

To put it simply, in technical rationality, the theory is an end in itself and they do not consider the application of the skill in reality. Scaffolding, on the other hand, develops knowledge of the theory and any required skill in the context of a real-life problem. This allows the student to see the larger picture rather than focus on finding and memorising the correct answer.

Sources:

Content is inspired by Chapter 3 of Cambridge Handbook of Learning Sciences.