Determine whether these prerequisite skills are reasonable for students to have already mastered prior to beginning your course.Ponder what prerequisite skills are necessary for students to have in order to be successful on this assignment/assessment and list them.Write a brief description of each major assignment/assessment which should include the necessary skills you intend to evaluate using the assignment/assessment.Consider these tips to scaffolding a major assignment or assessment. One unintended outcome of this exercise is that you may discover that either you have an assignment that is no longer relevant or you are missing something that might even be a more meaningful gauge of student learning. Identify what your major assignments/assessments are and then create a scaffold for each. Take some time to evaluate how youвЂ™ve designed the learning experiences in your courses. In other words, the heavier the weight, the stronger the support.

A good rule of thumb is the higher the stakes, the more scaffolding you need to include.

Whether your students are вЂњgrade-focusedвЂќ or вЂњlearning-focused,вЂќ they will benefit from the energy you put providing scaffolding opportunities for each major or key assignment in a course. However, often theyвЂ™ve not had any preparation to meet these high expectations and no opportunity to revise and resubmit their work. If there is one major paper in the course and 80% of their final grade depends on their ability to meet the high expectations of that paper, they better be able to produce a quality piece right out of the gate. This provides for consistent structural support, when required (Hogan & Pressley, 1997). VygotskyвЂ™s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) proposes that itвЂ™s important to determine the area (zone) between what a student can accomplish unaided and what that same student can accomplish with assistance. Sometimes we discover that students either donвЂ™t perform well on the learning experiences weвЂ™ve designed or they experience a great deal of frustration with what they consider high stakes assignments. WeвЂ™ve written a syllabus (or were handed one to use) and have developed some pretty impressive assessments, projects, and papers in order to evaluate our studentsвЂ™ progress through the content. We know our content areas and are experts in our fields, but structuring learning experiences for students may or may not be our strong suit. Many of us who teach in higher education do not have a teaching background, nor do we have experience in curriculum development.

Scaffolding design problems