Scaffolding and dialogic teaching in mathematics education: introduction and review

Abstract

This article has two purposes: firstly to introduce this special issue on scaffolding and dialogic teaching in mathematics education and secondly to review the recent literature on these topics as well as the articles in this special issue. First we define and characterise scaffolding and dialogic teaching and provide a brief historical overview of the scaffolding metaphor. Then we present a review study of the recent scaffolding literature in mathematics education (2010–2015) based on 21 publications that fulfilled our criteria and 14 articles in this special issue that have scaffolding as a central focus. This is complemented with a brief review of the recent literature on dialogic teaching. We critically discuss some of the issues emerging from these reviews and provide some recommendations. We argue that scaffolding has the potential to be a useful integrative concept within mathematics education, especially when taking advantage of the insights from the dialogic teaching literature.