What Kind of Scaffolding Should University Instructors Provide?
Determining what additional support promotes learning versus what substitutes for skills university students need to develop remains an open question.
The issue isn’t really about the amount of scaffolding instructors provide. It’s about the type. Some forms of support actively build student capacity. This includes detailed rubrics that demystify expectations, sample essays that illustrate strong reasoning, templates that model professional formatting, or prompts that help students assess their own understanding. These tools don’t do the work for students; they make the work more achievable.
Other forms of support are less clearly developmental. Automated deadline reminders provided by learning-management systems fall into this category. Some students find them helpful, particularly those managing complex schedules or navigating college without the benefit of prior models for academic success. But repeated reminders also risk creating dependence rather than building the time-management skills students need both during their academic careers and beyond.
Context matters here. Students arrive at university with very different levels of organizational ability and demands on their time. This is largely a function of prior educational experiences, neurodivergence, work obligations, caregiving responsibilities, and access to support systems. What one student experiences as excessive hand-holding might be an essential structure for another student learning to navigate academic expectations for the first time. A first-generation college student working two jobs faces different organizational challenges than someone whose family provided extracurricular tutors since middle school.
No single approach works for all students. The goal isn’t to withhold support in the name of toughness, but to provide structure that gradually transfers responsibility to students. Early in the semester, more reminders and check-ins might be appropriate. As the term progresses, those can taper off, signaling that students are expected to internalize and track their own obligations.
The medical analogy clarifies part of this tension. Doctors send appointment reminders because missed appointments create direct financial loss. In higher education, a student who misses a deadline doesn’t cost the instructor money. Arguably, it’s one less assignment or final exam to grade. But this framing misses the broader institutional and personal stakes: completion rates, retention metrics, and the students’ own investment in their education all suffer when deadlines slip. The question isn’t whether instructors have an incentive to remind students, but whether doing so serves educational aims.
Ultimately, the most useful scaffolding makes disciplinary thinking and academic processes transparent without doing that thinking for students. An assignment that includes a detailed breakdown of how historians evaluate sources teaches more than one that simply says “analyze your sources.” A rubric that distinguishes between summary and analysis helps students develop critical judgment. A sample outline reveals how arguments build coherently across paragraphs.
Deadline reminders, by contrast, don’t teach students how to plan backward from due dates, estimate how long tasks take, or balance competing priorities. These are skills students need to develop during college, and they matter long after the semester ends. The challenge for instructors is providing enough structure that students can succeed while resisting the impulse to manage students’ time on their behalf.
A well-designed syllabus, clear initial communication, and strategic use of developmental scaffolding can support students without undermining their growth. But here’s what’s at stake: students who never learn to manage their own time don’t just struggle in subsequent courses. They enter workplaces where no supervisor sends reminder emails about project deadlines, where the ability to anticipate, prioritize, and deliver without external prompting determines whether they advance or stall. The question isn’t whether to support students, but whether our support equips them for contexts where that support won’t exist.
Photo
Title: Scaffolding for rehabilitation in Madrid, Spain
Photographer. Felalo
