COMPUTERS IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR, vol.28, no.4, pp.1162-1169, 2012 (SSCI)
This study investigated how students with different prior knowledge and metacognitive skills benefited from continuous and faded domain-general and domain-specific scaffolds. Students' scores on a multiple-choice pretest, inventory of metacognitive self-regulation, and solution forms were analyzed. Results indicated that while students with lower regulation of cognition and objectivity benefited more from the domain-general scaffolds than the domain-specific ones, students with lower prior knowledge, knowledge of cognition, and problem representation took advantage of both domain-general and domain-specific conditions. Moreover, while students with lower prior knowledge, regulation of cognition, and problem representation took advantage of both continuous and faded domain-general scaffolds, students with lower knowledge of cognition and objectivity benefited more from the domain-general continuous conditions. In addition, students with lower prior knowledge, knowledge of cognition, and objectivity might have difficulties when the domain-specific conditions are faded. On the other hand, results of the study suggested that scaffolds did not substantially benefit the students with higher prior knowledge and higher metacognitive skills. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.