Technology-Mediated Scaffolding to Support Critical Thinking in Pre-Service Teachers’ Academic Writing

Developing critical thinking skills (CTS) is a central goal of higher education, yet pre-service teachers often receive little explicit guidance on how to apply them in academic or professional writing. This study reports the design, implementation, and initial examination of IDEA, a purpose-built platform for technology-mediated scaffolding in academic writing. The scaffold targets four CTS subskills: interpretation (clarifying meaning), analysis (examining relationships among ideas), explanation (articulating and justifying reasoning), and evaluation (judging claims against criteria). Using a design-based research (DBR) approach, 57 fourth-year pre-service language teachers at a highly selective Chilean university completed three structured writing tasks during one semester. The first two tasks were completed without IDEA; the third used the full scaffold. Students’ texts were assessed with an expert-reviewed analytical rubric. Cohen’s kappa for independent pre-consensus ratings was 0.88 for interpretation, 0.79 for analysis, 0.84 for explanation, and 0.83 for evaluation; Cronbach’s alpha across the pooled 171 text-level observations was 0.790, reported as a descriptive indicator of score coherence. Omnibus repeated-measures ANOVAs were statistically significant for all four subskills, and 11 of the 12 Bonferroni-adjusted pairwise comparisons were significant. Because the study had no control group and IDEA use coincided with the final task, these changes cannot be attributed to IDEA on the basis of this design. Focus group participants (n = 12) reported that the scaffold made CTS more concrete, helped them organize disciplinary reasoning, and increased their awareness of planning, self-evaluation, and revision. These findings concern critical-thinking performance in writing; overall writing quality was not measured separately.