JSET E Journal, 19(1) - I can do it better on the computer

I Can Do It Better on the Computer: The Effects of Technology-enabled Scaffolding on Young Writers' Composition

Carol Sue Englert
Maragaret Manalo
Yong Zhao
Michigan State University

Introduction
Computers as Cognitive Partners: Using Technology to Support Learning
Artifacts and technologies embody the collective knowledge, cultural tools, and social practices of a community. Technologies regulate and mediate individuals' interactions with the cultural environment by streamlining certain operations, mediating the actions and interactions of users, and supporting users' participation in a process or routine that might otherwise be too difficult to manage (Pea, 1993; Salomon, 1993). In many cases, users can offload some cognitive functions onto the technology, freeing up the intellect to direct other aspects and processes to accomplish a goal (Pea, 1993). A calculator, for example, offers an array of symbolic functions and computing tools that embody a set of mental and physical practices that one undertakes to complete a set of mathematical processes. Without access to these functions, the memory or cognition of a problem solver might be overwhelmed (Pea, 1993; Stone, 1998). In this manner, technology serves as a type of social actor or intellectual partner. Together the individual-operating-with-the-mediational-technology can participate in a process that, barring this support, might lie beyond his or her attainment. (Pea, 1993; Salomon, 1993; Wertsch, 1998).

In schools, the mediating quality of technology has particular appeal for supporting the participation of very young students or students with learning difficulties in intellectual activities that are beyond their immediate grasp. Technology can bring the endpoint forward to the beginning of the learning process, enabling more sophisticated levels of performance through instrumental assistance that enables students to schedule, organize and employ mental functions before they can accomplish those activities for themselves (Cole & Engestrom, 1993). In these circumstances, intellectual activity might be viewed as distributed between the user and the technology (Salomon, 1993), since the technology assists performance by affording specific patterns of reasoning that are otherwise unavailable (Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989).

A challenging instructional domain in which guided and supported participation through technology might benefit young students is writing. Writing is an abstract task since it involves a second-order symbolic system that must be consciously applied to communicate with a distant audience (Olson, 1995; Wells, 1999, 2000). To generate a text, students must be knowledgeable about the content, structures, and symbols of a written language, as well as know how to transform one's personal experience and everyday speech into written forms that are compatible with the requirements of a written register (Scribner, 1997). Students must know how to express one's central premise, and expand on that premise with details and elaborations that, likely, would be negotiated in face-to-face interactions between speakers and listeners. In these respects, writing development requires the acquisition of formal textual knowledge that extends beyond the intuitive knowledge of oral language that children bring to school. In fact, most young writers display an immature writing strategy known as the knowledge-telling strategy, as typified by the recording of their ideas in whatever order they come to mind in an associative process of idea generation (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1985).