How do students feel and collaborate during programming activities in the productive failure paradigm?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Background and Context Productive failure (PF) is a learning paradigm that flips the order of instruction: students work on a problem, then receive a lesson. PF increases learning, but less is known about student emotions and collaboration during PF, particularly in a computer science context. Objective To provide insight on students’ emotions and reasoning during PF activities and their relation to performance. Method We conducted a PF study (N = 48) with a programming problem. We used a mixed-methods approach to analyze students’ emotions, reasoning, and pretest/posttest performance. Findings Uncertainty occurred frequently compared to confusion, frustration, and positive affect. The constructive contributions made during problem solving correlated positively with posttest scores. Implications Although students failed to produce a correct solution, there were few instances of frustration and a promising amount of constructive reasoning during collaboration. This, coupled with prior work showing that PF improves learning over standard instruction, indicates that PF is a promising approach for computer science education.