Nursing Education

Scaffolding Assignments

by Paulina Guerrero

There has been a lot of chatter lately about AI, education, and forming “uncheatable assessments” or “AI-resistant” assessments. While cheating has existed long before college students had their own private dial-up internet, AI has posed new challenges in creating educational content that actually assesses and develops learner competencies and cognition. 

One of the answers that often comes up in these discussions is the scaffolded assignment. Many educators already create scaffolded assignments, whether they know it or not. It simply means breaking up a larger assignment into smaller sections throughout a course. A community health assessment for example, might start with a needs assessment survey, then a review of relevant literature with a bibliography, an outline, various methods of data collection, a synthesis of results, a plan of implementation for a solution, and a final presentation. There are infinite variations of this, and the ingenuity which educators have used scaffolded assignments have yielded great results-research generally shows that scaffolding assignments improves student performance, cognitive development, and motivation.

However, past the first glance the story is of course a little more complicated. Scaffolding assignments is a learning modality based on a learner’s “zone of proximal development” (ZPD), a term that refers to skills or content that is just out of a learner’s reach to complete on their own, but with the right support would be able to achieve and master. Support includes learning materials and most importantly, instructor feedback. 

When thinking about ZPD, this creates a new set of parameters to think about when creating scaffolded assignments. It is not just about breaking apart a large project into smaller tasks, it also involves formulating assignments that assists learning so that neural pathways are created for long-term memory, rather than short-term working memory. Dr. Leo Van Lier in his seminal book Interaction in the Language Curriculum: Awareness, Autonomy and Authenticity developed six principles for scaffolding assignments: 

  1. Contextual support—a safe but challenging environment, errors are expected and accepted as part of the learning process
  2. Continuity—repeated occurrences over time of a complex of actions, keeping a balance between routine and variation
  3. Intersubjectivity—mutual engagement and support, two minds thinking as one
  4. Flow—communication between participants is not forced, but flow in a natural way
  5. Contingency—the scaffolded assistance depends on learners’ reactions, elements can be added, changed, deleted, repeated, etc.
  6. Handover—the ZPD closes when the learner is ready to undertake similar tasks without help

So the original focus for scaffolded assignments was more intentional than simply breaking down a final project into smaller tasks. It’s really about instructor/student engagement, safety in experimentation, and the goal of a learner being able to complete the project on their own. 

The effects of scaffolding assignments to minimize AI-use have largely not been studied. So while it is often positioned as one of the main solutions to AI over-reliance, the technique and the technology still do not have conclusive results. Scaffolding is also considered controversial in some higher education spaces as not demonstrating an improvement in writing skills, and studies have shown that scaffolding makes great improvements in meta-cognitive domains, and less in affective and cognitive domains. In other words, students learn much more about how to self-reflect on how they learn and what works best for them in learning, and less improvements in memorization, problem-solving, and motivation. 

For more information check out: 

  1. Coffman, S., Iommi, M., & Morrow, K. (2023). Scaffolding as active learning in nursing education. Teaching and Learning in Nursing, 18(1), 232–237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.teln.2022.09.012
  2. Lier, L. V. (2014). Interaction in the Language Curriculum: Awareness, Autonomy and Authenticity. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315843223
  3. (PDF) A Meta-Analysis of Scaffolding Effects in Online Learning in Higher Education. (2026). ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v21i3.4638
  4. (PDF) The Effect of Scaffolding on Assignment Quality and Procedural Learning Achievement. (2026). ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.7358/ecps-2020-022-midu
  5. The Zone of Proximal Development in Vygotsky’s Analysis of Learning and Instruction (Chapter 2)—Vygotsky’s Educational Theory in Cultural Context. (n.d.). Retrieved September 3, 2026, from https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/vygotskys-educational-theory-in-cultural-context/zone-of-proximal-development-in-vygotskys-analysis-of-learning-and-instruction/1F8B412CF2A358988F0E7C2ABBCECBA3
Categories Assessment and Measurement, Learner Engagement, Learner Support