AUTHOR=van Rijn Lars , Wrede Silke Elisabeth , de Witt Claudia , Wang Xia , Duong-Trung Nghia , Jose Angelin Mary , Pinkwart Niels 

TITLE=Scaffolding recommendations for students’ essay planning

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Education

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2025.1621151

DOI=10.3389/feduc.2025.1621151

ISSN=2504-284X

ABSTRACT=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.