When failure fails to be productive: probing the effectiveness of productive failure for learning beyond STEM domains
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When failure fails to be productive: probing the effectiveness of productive failure for learning beyond STEM domains Valentina Nachtigall1 · Katja Serova1 · Nikol Rummel1 Received: 21 November 2018 / Accepted: 26 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The current work builds on research demonstrating the effectiveness of Productive Failure (PF) for learning. While the effectiveness of PF has been demonstrated for STEM learning, it has not yet been investigated whether PF is also beneficial for learning in non-STEM domains. Given this need to test PF for learning in domains other than mathematics or science, and the assumption that features embodied in a PF design are domain-independent, we investigated the effect of PF on learning social science research methods. We conducted two quasi-experimental studies with 212 and 152 10th graders. Following the paradigm of typical PF studies, we implemented two conditions: PF, in which students try to solve a complex problem prior to instruction, and Direct Instruction (DI), in which students first receive instruction followed by problem solving. In PF, students usually learn from their failure. Failing to solve a complex problem is assumed to prepare students for deeper learning from subsequent instruction. In DI, students usually learn through practice. Practicing and applying a given problem-solving procedure is assumed to help students to learn from previous instruction. In contrast to several studies demonstrating beneficial effects of PF on learning mathematics and science, in the present two studies, PF students did not outperform DI students on learning social science research methods. Thus, the findings did not replicate the PF effect on learning in a non-STEM domain. The results are discussed in light of mechanisms assumed to underlie the benefits of PF. Keywords Productive failure · Direct instruction · Time of instruction · Problem solving prior to instruction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1125 1-020-09525-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Valentina Nachtigall [email protected] Katja Serova [email protected] Nikol Rummel [email protected] 1
Institute of Educational Research, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universitätsstr. 150, 44801 Bochum, Germany
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Introduction In the last decade there has been increased interest in investigating the effectiveness of approaches with problem solving prior to instruction, such as Productive Failure (PF), for students’ knowledge acquisition. Several recent reviews of studies testing for the PF effect (cf., Kapur 2015; Loibl et al. 2017; Darabi et al. 2018) have demonstrated beneficial effects of PF (or problem-solving prior to instruction approaches more generally) on students’ acquisition of conceptual knowledge. This increased interest in the effectiveness of PF might be partly due to the expectation that PF holds the potential to resolve the assist
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