Facilitating Adult Learning : The Effects of Scaffolding Strategies and Self-Regulation on Discussion Participation and Performance in Online Learning

Abstract

As the life expectancy of human beings gets longer and our society changes into highly competitive arena, the implementation of online adult learning is growing, and therefore the learners in self-regulated scaffolding learning environments is becoming an important topic. This study is to investigate the main effects of scaffolding and self-regulation and the interaction effect on discussion participation and comprehension in online learning environments. To do this, ninety-nine adults taking online learning courses with the open university in Korea were investigated. Adult learners were divided into one of the four groups (no scaffolding, conceptual, strategic, and conceptual and strategic scaffoldings). Regarding self-regulation, learners were divided into two groups (low and high self-regulated) based on the mean score of subjective report of self-regulated learning. The results are as follows : First, `strategic scaffolding` is more effective than `conceptual scaffolding` in discussion participation (F