Productive Failure

By Manu Kapur. International Conference of the Learning Sciences, 2006

1,007 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is now a substantive body of research that demonstrates the effectiveness of Productive Failure (PF) for learning novel concepts across STEM domains. I will start by describing what PF is, and situate the case for PF both theoretically and empirically. I will then delineate boundary conditions for how, when and why PF succeeds, ending with implications for teaching and learning.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/abca8265a420f9b2cf03c9768249b2f1d4d862a2

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Media Technology

Citations in the corpus

Designing for Productive Failure (2012, background): “In other contexts and settings in which socio-mathematical norms are more aligned toward exploration, such efforts may not be as deliberate (e.g., Kapur, 2008).”
Productive failure in mathematical problem solving (2010, background): “Inadvertently, this has led to a commonly-held belief that there is little efficacy in students solving complex, illstructured problems without the provision of external structures to support them (Kapur, 2006, in press).”
Towards a Theory of Experience (2014, background): “Moreover, the discussion is always held in terms of the emergence (either from within or from without) of “conceptual” structures (e.g. Kapur, 2008).”
Foundations of Game-Based Learning (2015, background): “…for game-based learning is that it allows for graceful failure: Rather than describing it as an undesirable outcome, failure is by design an expected and some-times even necessary step in the learning process (Kapur, 2008; Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012; Kapur & Kinzer, 2009; Plass, Perlin, et al., 2010).”
Resisting Overzealous Transfer: Coordinating Previously Successful Routines With Needs for New Learning (2012, background): “Kapur (2008) found that withholding answers improves the depth of learning and transfer, even when students often fail to generate the correct solutions.”
Learning from errors: A model of individual processes (2016, methodology): “…reflection on errors and (self-) explanation of the underlying misconceptions has been shown to be important for learning progress since these processes help to establish accurate mental models (Kapur 2008; Mathan & Koedinger, 2005; Oser & Spychiger, 2005; Siegler, 2002; Van Lehn et al., 2003).”
Seeking the General Explanation: A Test of Inductive Activities for Learning and Transfer. (2015, background): “The failure to find the deep structure does not mean students did not learn (Kapur, 2008).”
Managing Uncertainty During Collaborative Problem Solving in Elementary School Teams: The Role of Peer Influence in Robotics Engineering Activity (2014, background): “However, research by Kapur and colleagues has shown that, properly managed, involving students in active struggle can be productive for learning (Kapur, 2008; Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012).”
Does Text Complexity Matter in the Elementary Grades? A Research Synthesis of Text Difficulty and Elementary Students’ Reading Fluency and Comprehension (2017, background): “…in classrooms (Clifford 1984), others point to the benefits of challenge, noting that working through challenging tasks –– even when the outcomes are not successful –– is necessary for students to increase their capacity in a domain, a notion known as productive failure (e.g., Kapur 2008).”
Learning mathematics through algorithmic and creative reasoning (2014, background): “The rationale is that practicing with CMR task emphasizing students’ own construction of solution in an adidactical context (Brousseau, 1997) requires more effortful ‘struggle’ (Kapur, 2008; Niss, 2007) that results in better memory consolidation (e.g., Pyc & Rawson, 2009).”
Comparing Learning From Productive Failure and Vicarious Failure (2014, background): “In this short article, I examine this question in the context of my work on productive failure (PF; Kapur, 2008; Kapur & Bielaczyc, 2012).”