Towards Using Coherence Analysis to Scaffold Students in Open-Ended Learning Environments

Scaffolding students in open-ended learning environments (OELEs) is a difficult challenge. The open-ended nature of OELEs allows students to simultaneously pursue, modify, and abandon any of a large number of both short-term and long-term approaches to completing their tasks. To overcome these challenges, we have recently developed coherence analysis, which focuses on students’ ability to interpret and apply the information available in the OELE. This approach has yielded valuable dividends: by characterizing students according to the coherence of their behavior, teachers and researchers have access to easily-calculated, intuitive, and actionable measures of the quality of students’ problem-solving processes. The next step in this line of research is to develop a framework for using coherence analysis to adaptively scaffold students in OELEs. In this paper, we present our initial ideas for this work and propose guidelines for the construction of a scaffolding framework.