Researcher Track 1D: Manu

Productive Failure, by Dr Manu Kapur

Dr Manu's research is about persistence vs performance success. Is there a hidden efficacy in un-scaffolded, ill-structured problem-solving processes?

He studied two groups of students chatting on MSN—one discussing ill-structured and the other well-structured physics questions. He found that although the performance of groups working on ill-structured questions seemed chaotic and ineffective, these groups later outperformed their peers on individual well-structured questions. This shows that it is beneficial to have tasks that develop persistence through failure.

Therefore, an implication of this finding is that we need to question the default pedagogical rush to scaffold ill-structured problem solving!! He says that it is possible to go backwards from complex to simple, instead of what we have been taught, to scaffold from simple to complex! Whoa... Quite against the grain.

He did a study at Clementi Town Secondary School. They implemented two cycles: the productive-failure cycle (no homework) and the lecture-practice cycle. For the productive-failure cycle, students had high engagement but low confidence (the vast majority could not solve the problem at all). At the final test, the students in the productive-failure cycle outperformed students the lecture-practice cycle on both well-structured items (which is remarkable cos they had no homework or practice at all!), and the ill-structured items.

We assume that students are ready to make optimal use of the structure that we design for them, but that is not always true. His study showed that students who went through the productive-failure cycle were actually better equipped to make use of the scaffolding provided for them. It means that sometimes short-term inefficiency may lead to long-term performance.

Order is important, but how it comes about is more important. Top-down order is efficient; bottom-up is more flexible and adaptable, that is, IF it emerges. Ha! Singapore emphasizes an efficiency-dominated pedagogy. Dr Manu proposes that we should have an innovation-dominated paradigm, rather than an effeciency-dominated one.

Dr Manu's study is really intresting. I wonder if productive failure works for the learning of language?