| Sumario: | Background: Teachers have their students practice physics problems both at home and in class. In class, the teacher provides students who need help with feedback. However, at home, students do not receive such feedback. A digital system that provides support outside the classroom could improve student performance. Objectives: This study aimed to determine whether digital scaffolding can improve students' conceptual physics knowledge. The study addressed the topic of radiation and radioactivity, a secondary school physics subject that introduces many new concepts. Methods: The study involved a double‐blind, randomized controlled trial with a pre‐test and a post‐test. The Digi‐Feedback web‐based software was designed to provide students with digital scaffolding during all phases of problem solving, and Digi‐Feedback kept logs of all student actions. Results and Conclusions: Students' conceptual knowledge was enhanced by straightforward scaffolding, especially scaffolding that encouraged them to compare their solutions with worked examples. Immediate feedback played a crucial role here, as it helped to direct students towards correcting solutions real‐time, enabling them to correct errors and reinforce understanding. This immediate feedback fosters a responsive learning environment, allowing students to explore complex concepts more effectively. They deepened their conceptual knowledge by studying a worked example when they had first developed their own solution. The findings indicate that easily applied digital scaffolding has the potential to increase students' conceptual knowledge without extra time investment from students and teachers. This method of digital scaffolding could potentially be applied in other STEM subjects as well. Lay Description: What is currently known about the subject matter ○Feedback is potentially an effective mechanism to improve performance.○Students have three types of problems with physics assignments: they do not know the required concepts, they make incorrect connections between concepts, and their views do not match the scientific perspective.○Solving problems is one of the most important skills for physicists and a key learning objective in secondary schools.What does this paper add? ○Worked examples of solutions of physics problems enhance student understanding and knowledge.○Checklists boost student understanding.○Digital support helps students in all steps of problem solving.○Multiple‐choice questions and digital examples correct misconceptions.○Learners with little prior knowledge benefit greatly from immediate feedback.○Digital support results in significantly higher test scores without requiring students to spend more time on assignments.Implications for practice/or policy ○Students learn more from reviewing their own answers if they receive instruction on what to look for when marking their answers.○Answer booklets are used more effectively if they are supplemented with prompts and tips.○Digital feedback does not have to be complicated and is easily incorporated into existing digital components of physics textbooks.
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