A questioning environment for scaffolding learners' questioning engagement with academic text: a university case study

Abstract

Access to the textual world of academia requires that learners are familiar with the critical open-ended questioning stance demanded by textuality. Anecdotal evidence suggests that learners registered for the Bachelor of Education Honours degree are unable to generate appropriate questions to interrogate academic text, impacting on their ability to engage effectively with academia. While ample research exists to suggest that face-to-face scaffolding can facilitate learners' access to academic text, this is often a time consuming, repetitive activity, which fails to track learners' questions over time. Given that questioning is one of the most important learning-teaching tools available to both learner and educator, we have created a computer-based scaffolding environment in which students are required to generate questions to interrogate academic texts. Learners have been using this new scaffolding tool this year, and we report on preliminary findings from the study.


South African Journal of Higher Education Vol.17(2) 2003: 139-147