Development of Scaffolding Indicators from Archival Problem-Based Learning Online Discussions of Distance and Blended Undergraduate Science Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study used an open coding approach to content analysis of online problem-based learning (PBL) asynchronous online discussion posts from an undergraduate ecotoxicology course to evaluate the following research questions: What types of scaffolds are used most by students? Are there differences in use across students from distance and blended courses? Is there evidence in the discussion posts that the scaffolds used by students support their critical thinking? The course is taught in the context of a multidisciplinary B.Sc. in Environmental Science Program. The unit of analysis for the content analysis will be the words/phrases in the discussion posts. A coding scheme was developed to capture the use of two types of learning scaffolds - instructor and group organization scaffolds, and citations learning scaffolds (source materials). This study highlights differences in distance and blended student use of learning scaffolds during their PBL case problem discussions, as well as how differences in the primary communication medium between distance and blended teams appear to influence their use.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".