Students’ use of digital scaffolding at University level: emergence of utilization schemes

This paper is focused on a pilot study involving a group of first year engineering students and concerning the design and implementation of two digital tasks on multiple representations of subsets of the plane. The tasks were engineered in order to provide university students with hints and feedback aimed at scaffolding their work. The analysis of the video-recordings of the students’ screens while interacting with the tasks, supported by the reflections developed by students during audio-recorded interviews after the activity, enabled us to highlight utilization schemes that characterize students’ use of digital tools for scaffolding their learning. We will also discuss how this analysis gave us suggestions for a future re-design of the tasks.