Let Them Struggle First: The Case for Productive Failure

Article 03 opened in a quiet exam hall, and this one opens in class. A student tries three wrong approaches to a consolidation question and raises a hand, slightly crushed.

Your instinct is to rescue them at once, but one research team suggests that waiting can pay off, as long as the teaching follows straight after.

Maria Mylopoulos and four University of Toronto colleagues make the case for productive failure. Learners first attempt problems that need concepts they haven't been taught yet, and they fall short. Then they get immediate feedback and teaching that pulls the ideas together.

Citing earlier studies, the authors say this has been shown to build conceptual knowledge, which is understanding why, better than direct instruction. It has also been linked to better scores on tests of preparation for future learning, meaning the ability to learn something new.

Try this first: since failing first seems to build the "why", use the start of your next consolidation lecture. Give pairs who know the basics ten minutes to work out how a parent's and a subsidiary's balance sheets might be combined. Then teach the method straight away from their attempts. That's our suggestion, not a tested routine.

What they found

The authors are clear that failure isn't automatically productive. It can also waste a learning opportunity and leave misconceptions behind, so it needs deliberate design.

First, the problem must be pitched so that it activates what learners already know. A completely unfamiliar problem, they warn, is likely to lead to disengagement and unproductive failure.

Next, the task should point learners to the concept's critical features, often through contrasting cases or "what if" questions. Learners should also explain the differences they notice rather than simply describe them.

Finally, immediate feedback and consolidation must follow. Borrowing an older phrase, the authors call this the "time for telling", because the failed attempts have exposed the gaps and instruction is now most effective.

Most productive-failure research comes from classrooms, they note, but this paper is about the clinical workplace, where trainees must learn while also caring for patients.

There, they argue, accreditation pressure has often turned into efforts to eliminate all struggle, which leads to ineffective learning. Instead, they suggest reading routine learner feedback for patterns of productive and unproductive struggle.

In one example, a paediatric rotation starts trainees on routine cases with "what if" questions and then moves them to complex ones. Trainees were anxious at first about showing gaps in public, the paper reports, but grew comfortable as faculty praised problem solving.

Safety is the boundary. Where trainees described being made fun of publicly, the authors class the struggle as unproductive, because the setting is psychologically unsafe. Trainees who fear career repercussions, they note, avoid tackling problems at the bedside.

What they did

This conceptual paper draws on cognitive and sociocultural research and illustrates its argument with one rotation example and four short cases.

As Article 03 noted, the twelve tips paper comes from the same group at Toronto's Wilson Centre, so read the two as one school of thought.

The reality check: this is an argument paper from medical education, and it reports no new data. Its claims about effectiveness rest on earlier studies that the authors cite.

The rotation and the cases are illustrations, with no data reported from them. Nothing was tested with accounting students, so every accounting example here is ours.