Abstract
Experiences of failure can provide valuable opportunities to learn, however, the typical classroom does not tend to function from an orientation of learning from failure. Rather, educators aim to teach accurate information as efficiently as possible, with the main goal for students to be able to produce correct knowledge when called for, in the classroom and beyond. Alternatively, teaching for failure requires instructional designs that function out of a different paradigm altogether. Failures can occur during activities like problem solving, problem posing, idea generation, comparing/contrasting cases, or inventing formalisms or pattern-based rules. We present findings from a study done in fourth-grade classes on environmental sustainability that used a design allowing for failures to occur during collaboration. These center on dialogs that included “micro-failures,” where we could address how students deal with failure during the process of learning. Our design drew from “productive failure,” where students are given opportunities to fail at producing canonical concepts before receiving explicit instruction, and unscripted collaborative learning, where students engage in collaboration without being directed in specific dialogic moves. By focusing on failures during an unscripted collaborative process, our work achieved two goals: (1) We singled out occurrences of failure by analyzing students’ dialogs when they encountered impasses and identified several behaviors that differentially related to learning; (2) We explored how the form of task design influences the collaborative learning process around failure occurrences, showing the potential benefits of more structured tasks.
Highlights
Experiences of failure can provide valuable opportunities to learn, instruction in common school settings tends to be based on student “success.” In such settings, teachers use homework marks, class grades, and exam scores to measure “correctness” of student knowledge; typically the higher the score, the more correct knowledge a student has acquired and the more successfully s/he has learned
In order to more broadly evaluate how Functional and Dysfunctional behaviors for each dyad into ratios students dealt with failure, we collapsed all behaviors that were over the total number of behaviors (2–10 from Table 2), in order to positively correlated with scores into a one category and all observe the relationships between the proportions of each type of behaviors that were negatively correlated with scores into another behavior and posttest scores. (See Table 4 below)
We found that the dyads from the Select group tended to engage in more questioning, explaining, and arguing to consensus during micro-failures compared to the Generate group
Summary
Experiences of failure can provide valuable opportunities to learn, instruction in common school settings tends to be based on student “success.” In such settings, teachers use homework marks, class grades, and exam scores to measure “correctness” of student knowledge; typically the higher the score, the more correct knowledge a student has acquired and the more successfully s/he has learned. Based on the two stages of Productive Failure and considering the two aforementioned design features of unscripted Collaborative Learning, is a less well-known design called Preparation for Future Collaboration (PFC).[24,32] In PFC activities, students engage responses, fostering dialogic behaviors such as explaining, in an exploration task allowing for idea generation and afterward questioning, and debating.[24] As students continue to engage in are provided explicit instruction, delaying support towards discussion, they are likely to self-regulate to reach mutual correct understanding. See the Methods section for details on our verbal analyses
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
