Researchers argue that scaffolding students' mathematical thinking is an effective teaching practice (Calder, 2015; Mercer & Littleton, 2007; Roll, Holmes, Day, & Bonn, 2012) that supports students when they need additional assistance to complete a task (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). Others demonstrate the importance of enacting cognitively demanding tasks because they help build students' capacity for mathematical reasoning (Stein, Grover, & Henningsen, 1996) and are critical to students' achievement and learning (Charalambous, 2008; Hiebert & Wearne, 1993; Stein & Lane, 1996). Recent literature identifies a connection-and at times a tension-between scaffolding and cognitive demand (Sullivan & Mornane, 2014).For this dissertation, I conducted an empirical study that included classroom observations and semi-structured teacher interviews to address a gap in research by asking the following research questions within the context of cognitively demanding tasks: 1) How do teachers think about the relationship between scaffolding and maintaining cognitive demand?, 2) In what ways do teachers provide scaffolding through discourse? and 3) What are students' experiences and in what ways do teachers respond to students' experiences?I analyzed teachers' discourse, specifically teacher questions and prompts, during the teachers' enactment of the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP) curriculum and teacher interviews. In this work, teachers voiced their struggle of providing appropriate scaffolding without reducing the cognitive demand of tasks. I used curriculum (lesson phases and focus questions), student uncertainty, and student frustration as contexts to illustrate how the participating teachers mediated tension between scaffolding and cognitive demand. Drawing from teachers' strategies, largely teacher discourse, I developed a teacher question framework that described the nature of unfolding teacher questions that encouraged student exploration and conceptual learning.Instead of fading, teacher scaffolding changed to reflect the contexts mentioned above while maintaining cognitive demand. My findings provide insights for professional development on enacting cognitively demanding tasks.
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