Writing and commenting on professional procedures: in search of learning designs promoting articulation between school and workplace learning

The present study investigated the effect of scaffolding in a learning design in which apprentices were asked to reuse workplace experience to comment on peers' written productions. Apprentices were asked to perform an authentic workplace task, to explain how they got to the solution and then to comment on a peer's solution. Two conditions of scaffolding were compared: In the high scaffold condition, guiding questions were provided both for explanation and commenting, while in the low scaffold condition, a general instruction was given. The findings showed that, for the first tasks, the high scaffold group outperformed the low scaffold one with regard to the quality of the quotes and self explanations, but that the pattern reversed by the end of the activity. These results show that scaffolding is a useful tool for supporting reflection and learning, but that it should be adapted to the different steps of the activities.