Productive Failure.¶
Kapur, M. (2008). Productive Failure. Cognition and Instruction, 26(3), 379-424.
Cited by¶
5 citations across 5 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Counterfactual Reasoning
- Educational learning and productive failure. Kapur's (2008)
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
Kapur's study presents "an existence proof for productive failure": engaging students in solving complex, ill-structured problems without support structures can be a productive exercise in failure, and those students "outperformed their counterparts in the well-structured condition on individual near- and far-transfer measures subsequently". That is the phenomenon the heading names in attaching this work to productive failure. What the work reports is outperformance on transfer measures, which it calls an existence proof; the citation line's gloss about deeper learning than direct instruction goes beyond that.
“This study demonstrates an existence proof for productive failure: engaging students in solving complex, ill-structured problems without the provision of support structures can be a productive exercise in failure.”
- Educational learning and productive failure. Kapur's (2008)
- Tension And Release
- Pedagogy. Productive failure deliberately introduces cognitive instability before resolution to insight; the learner's puzzlement is the load-bearing phase, and assessment-then-explanation trades on the same dynamics.
This sourceDeliberately inducing cognitive instability/puzzlement before resolution to insight, the held difficulty being the load-bearing phase of learning.
Supported in partVerified against the publisher's abstract
Kapur's abstract supports failure-before-instruction yielding later transfer gains, but neither "cognitive instability"/"puzzlement" phrasing nor the assessment-then-explanation clause appears in it.
“Groups who solved ill-structured problems expectedly struggled with defining and analyzing the problems, resulting in poor quality of solutions. However, despite failing in their collaborative efforts, these students outperformed their counterparts in the well-structured condition on individual near- and far-transfer measures subsequently, suggesting a latent productivity in what initially seemed to be failure.”
- Pedagogy. Productive failure deliberately introduces cognitive instability before resolution to insight; the learner's puzzlement is the load-bearing phase, and assessment-then-explanation trades on the same dynamics.
Domain-specific¶
- Generation Effect
- Manu Kapur's "productive failure" studies in Singapore secondary-school mathematics classrooms
This sourceKapur's founding productive-failure study, in which eleventh-graders who first struggled with ill-structured kinematics problems later did better on transfer.
Supported in partVerified against the source
- Manu Kapur's "productive failure" studies in Singapore secondary-school mathematics classrooms
Mechanisms¶
- Discovery Task
- This is the logic of productive failure — letting people grapple with and even fumble a problem before instruction, so the eventual explanation has something to attach to.
This sourceDemonstrates productive failure by having students attempt complex problems without support before subsequent instruction.
- This is the logic of productive failure — letting people grapple with and even fumble a problem before instruction, so the eventual explanation has something to attach to.
- Productive-Struggle Pause and Reveal
- The discipline is that struggle is instrumental, never the goal: it is justified only by the reveal it prepares, and the frustration cap outranks the buildup every time.
This sourceShows that initial struggle is instrumental and justified by the later reveal it prepares.
- The discipline is that struggle is instrumental, never the goal: it is justified only by the reveal it prepares, and the frustration cap outranks the buildup every time.
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 3 of 5 citations: 3 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
See how references were verified.
Registry ID ref:e7a0288489dd · see in the full table