When failure fails to be productive: probing the effectiveness of productive failure for learning beyond STEM domains

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.

Investigating students’ perceived authenticity of learning activities in an out-of-school lab for social sciences: a replication study

“…Betz et al, 2016;Lepper, 1988). However, it should be mentioned that PF students in the present study did not outperform DI students on a knowledge test (see our parallel study on the same dataset: Nachtigall et al, 2020). However, the findings of our previous study demonstrated no correlation between students' perceived authenticity and their performance on a knowledge test.…”

“…We did not administer a pretest assessing students' knowledge about social science research methods, because such a pretest could have activated relevant prior knowledge in students. Consequently, the beneficial effects hypothesized to underlie the initial problem-solving phase of PF could have been negated (see Newman & DeCaro, 2018; see also Nachtigall et al, 2020). However, the design of the present study partly built on the assumption that secondary school students lack knowledge about social science research methods and, thus, are unable to accurately judge the authenticity of learning activities that try to emulate processes of scientific inquiry within the social sciences.…”

“…Table 6 gives a description of the final eight items of the posttest. For a detailed description of the posttest items, see the supplementary materials in Nachtigall et al (2020).…”

“…We compared the effects of the two learning activities (i.e., PF versus DI) on students' perceived authenticity and their situational interest while learning the scientific practice of evaluating causal versus correlational evidence in an OSL for social sciences. These analyses are part of a dataset, which is also used in a paper focusing on a different research question and on different variables (Nachtigall et al, 2020).…”

“…Please note that we investigated the effectiveness of PF for students' knowledge-test performance in a parallel study on the same dataset (seeNachtigall et al, 2020), where we report the following descriptive statistics for students' performance on the knowledge test: PF: M = 9.61 (SD = 3.62); DI: M = 10.07 (SD = 3.87).…”