The question for this design experiment was to understand how students collaboratively made sense of difficult texts in an online environment, Knowledge Forum®. Students at the Institute for Child Study Laboratory School (ICS) used scaffold supports derived from research showing that an expert strategy for comprehending difficult text was to formulate the difficulty as a problem thus affording general problem-solving procedures (Bereiter & Bird, 1985). The difficult texts were published notes from students in Japan who had studied genetically modified foods. Their database notes were translated into English and entered into the ICS database. ICS students took part in a session where scaffold supports, such as “interpretation” were introduced, discussed and modeled using a think aloud procedure when reading a text on genetic modification. Subsequently, students read and built onto the Japanese students’ notes using the scaffold supports. In a second iteration, students identified problems of understanding that they then studied in small groups. Results showed that students used more scaffold supports in the first iteration (1.26 supports/note) compared to the second iteration (.63 scaffold supports/note) indicating that when the texts were problematic students used supports, especially the “interpretation” support to help their understanding.