S Scaffolding in Mathematics Education Bert van Oers Faculty of Behavioural and Human Movement Sciences, Department Research and Theory in Education, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Keywords Support system; Help; Zone of proximal devel- opment; Educative strategy Definition Scaffolding is generally conceived as an interac- tional process between a person with educational intentions and a learner, aiming to support this learner’ s learning process by giving appropriate and temporary help. Scaffolding in mathematics education is the enactment of this purposive inter- action for the learning of mathematical actions and problem solving strategies. A number of clarifying corollary postulates are usually added for the completion of this general definition of scaffolding in a specific situation: Scaffolding is an intentional support system based on purposive interactions with more competent others, which can be adults or peers; the sup- port can be individualized (one teacher scaffolding one student) or collective (a group scaffolding its members in a distributed way). The support consists of employing instructional means that are supposed to help learners with the accomplishment of a new (mathematical) task by assisting him/her to carry out the required activity through providing help at parts of the activity that aren’t yet indepen- dently mastered by the learner; this is to be distinguished from just simplifying the task by cutting it down into a collection of isolated elementary tasks. Scaffolding aims at providing learners help that is contingent on the learner’ s prior qualities and contributes to the development of knowledge, skills, and confidence to cope with the full complexity of the task; as such scaffolding is to be distinguished from straightforward instruction in correct task performance. As a support system scaffolding is essentially a temporary construction of external help that is supposed to fade away in due time. Characteristics Tutoring Learning The notion of educational support systems for the appropriation of complex activities was first intro- duced by Bruner in the 1950s in his studies of language development in young children. In opposition to the Chomskyan explanation of lan- guage development resulting from an inherent # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 S. Lerman (ed.), Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77487-9_136-2