An Empirical Study of Scaffolding Strategy to Cultivate College Students’ Self-Directed Learning Ability: Taking the Basic Computer Course of North Normal University as an Example

Abstract

With the updating of knowledge and the development of talent strategy, diversified talents with innovation and self-directed learning ability are valued. Higher education requires more autonomy from students, but some university freshmen have the phenomenon of maladaptation, which affects the formation of growth and innovation ability, and requires teachers to cultivate their sense of independent inquiry, time management ability and so on. The paper divides the cultivation of autonomous learning ability into 4 first-level dimensions and 15 specific dimensions, and adopts a scaffolding teaching strategy, which is divided into two kinds of scaffolding oriented to knowledge points and process and method. The teaching practice was carried out with the freshmen of 2023 Inspirational Class and Pedagogy Class as the target and the university information technology class as the carrier: firstly, the scaffolding strategy was used as the basis for analyzing the teaching content and target, designing the curriculum and forming the cultivation model; then, the practical activities were carried out to determine the starting point of the teaching through questionnaires and interviews, and the teaching practice was carried out in multiple rounds to validate the feasibility and validity based on the data, and to improve the teaching design in an iterative manner. The results show that the experimental class has higher final grades than the control class, significantly higher collaboration, motivation and other abilities than the control class, and the dimensions of independent learning ability are greatly improved, and the model is feasible and effective, which can be used as a reference for the cultivation of students’ independent learning ability.