Metacognitive scaffolding

What is it?

It is important to provide students with the tools to become effective learners and this is particularly important in an online learning environment. Metacognitive scaffolding can help promote learning practices that prepare students to learn in environments that require self-direction and the capacity to reflect on areas that require attention or further consideration. The emergence of generative AI (GenAI) in higher education has also enabled the introduction of GenAI as as a tool for facilitating metacognitive scaffolding (Wu et al. 2025).

One of the most well-known constructs that is used to help design metacognitive scaffolds is self-regulated learning (SRL) theory. There are various flavours of the theory (Wong et al., 2019) but the key features consist of the following ‘learn to learn’ skills:

1. Analyse  learning tasks . Encourage students to think about whether the task uses previous knowledge or skills and to identify any gaps to complete the task. This will help them to set goals and plans throughout the unit.
2. Goal setting and planning . Encourage students to think about setting goals. Goals might include completing set readings, providing responses to discussion board threads or completing a formative assessment. To complete goals students should also think about planning how they will meet the goals – for example, do students need access to peers or more help from the teaching staff? Goal setting and planning is particularly important for major pieces of assessment. ‘Scaffolding’ can also be used to help students (particularly those new to university study) to prepare for major assessment tasks.
3. Monitoring learning practices . Ask students to reflect on their learning practices and encourage them to think about why which ones worked and which ones didn’t. This will help to encourage students to improve and adapt their learning practices to effectively meet the requirements of the unit.