BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1621151
Scaffolding Recommendations for Students' Essay Planning
Provisionally accepted
Lars Van Rijn1*
Silke Elisabeth Wrede1*
Nghia Trung Duong2
Xia Wang2Angelin Mary Jose2Claudia de Witt1Niels Pinkwart2- 1University of Hagen, Hagen, Germany
- 2German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Berlin, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Planning scientific essays is a fundamental activity for students to acquire and demonstrate research competence in higher education. The planning and writing process is complex and time-consuming, requiring significant effort from both students and tutors. Consequently, recommender systems have been used to support the writing process, but the evidence regarding their pedagogical effectiveness is sparse. In this study we conceptualize and evaluate an approach to closely align a recommender system with pedagogical principles of the specific use case. In our Wizard-of-Oz experiment we therefore used scaffolded recommendations to explore whether this approach can assist students in planning a scientific essay for a course in media education. The intervention resulted in positive effects on the time students' need to be tutored for and the intention of students to reuse the system. We discuss implications of these results for the design of supporting essay planning through recommender systems, considering limitations of the method applied.
Keywords: essay planning, Research competence, Students, higher education, scaffolding, recommendations
Received: 30 Apr 2025; Accepted: 01 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Van Rijn, Wrede, Duong, Wang, Jose, de Witt and Pinkwart. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Lars Van Rijn, University of Hagen, Hagen, Germany
Silke Elisabeth Wrede, University of Hagen, Hagen, Germany
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.