Bitesize Research: Why Failure Is Important For Learning

By Jaya Carrier

I hope you’re all having a good week so far. One of the things that has shaped our ongoing thinking about performance management has been the idea of ‘praiseworthy failure’ (Edmonson, 2011). Connected to this, I was interested in a recent interview with learning scientist Manu Kapur, who was explaining his ideas about failure in student learning.

Objectives: To understand the importance of failure in student learning processes

Summary: 

• Kapur’s concept of ‘productive failure’ suggests that teacher impulses to immediately correct or help students may not best enable their learning.

• He suggests that teachers should design elements of failure into their courses of study. This could include ‘purposeful obstacles’, problem solving and activities which are challenging such that they are just beyond the reach of the students.

• Kapur argues that ‘productive failure’ is much more effective than ‘discovery learning’, whereby the goal of the former is to incorporate failure in a safe and coordinated way.

• Kapur argues that productive failure enables a good mid-point between direct instruction and discovery learning, and that if faithfully adopted according to the original principles, students can unlock 10-20% better results in their conceptual understanding and in their ability to transfer ideas to novel problems or scenarios.

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• What sorts of purposeful obstacles or productive failure tasks would work in my subject and with my learners?

• What might the benefits of using tasks like this be?

• How does this link to the IB learner profile and Approaches to Teaching?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!