Students need support to learn the core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts that make up the field of biology so that they can both be successful as biologists and make informed decisions that require biological understanding. One way instructors can support students in these endeavors is to provide students with specific scaffolds the instructors design to structure students' performance on a task or engagement in a behavior. With the focus on both scientific concepts and practices, instructors may also need support to be able to develop scaffolds that align with suggested best practices. I offer a framework, referred to as FRAMER, and suggestions for instructors interested in developing scaffolds for biology courses, and provide an example of a successful scaffold implementation in an undergraduate biology course.
University of California Press