If a medical student begins working in an internship program, and is gradually assigned to treat patients under the close supervision and guidance of an experienced doctor, how would instructional scaffolding be represented in this scenario? I'm having trouble understanding this concept for my education psych class!Thanks in advance for the help!! :)
Scaffolding supports construction workers so that they don't fall off the roof beams, for example. Scaffolding in education means giving students support- not leaving them hanging off a ledge. You don't want a med student to go from reading about diseases in a textbook to treating patients on his/her own. There has to be a transition. The student reads the files, examines the patients, talks to the patient, and then makes a diagnosis and prescribes a treatment. The scaffolding is having an experienced doctor there to say the student make the right decision, or to point out where the student went wrong- before the patient gets the wrong treatment or medicine.
