Perhaps one of the most universal concerns among educators is how to prepare students for future learning. Previous studies have found that having students freely explore solutions to difficult problems before formal instruction of the relevant concepts is beneficial for conceptual understanding and transfer. However, little is known about how scaffolding student solutions toward success or failure during the initial problem-solving attempts influence learning outcomes. 

Sinha et al. (2021) delved into this problem by randomly assigning 221 graduate students to one of four experimental conditions: two success-driven scaffolding conditions varied in the number of specific clues, and two failure-driven scaffolding conditions differed in the intensity of optimal clues. Students completed two problem-solving tasks with different conceptual topics, and then received formal instruction about the concepts as well as correct solutions to the previous problems. The researchers found that students in the failure-driven conditions outperformed those who received success-driven activities with specific clues on transfer tasks. Moreover, students in the failure-driven conditions tended to show higher levels of reasoning than those in the success-driven conditions. It is worth noting that these patterns were more salient for learning more difficult concepts, supporting the idea that presenting some challenges can be motivating for students in the context of learning from failure. 

One of EPIC’s missions is to explore how failure benefits learning. Emphasizing the beneficial effects of failure-driven preparatory activities on learning from formal instructions, this study supports the need for future educational research studies on preparation for future learning. Perhaps educators and teachers who want to maximize students’ takeaways from lectures can consider incorporating preparatory failure-driven activities into their instruction design, especially when the content is conceptually difficult. 

For more information about Sinha et al.'s (2021)’s study, check out the following link for the journal article:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-43446-001

Reference: 

Sinha, T., Kapur, M., West, R., Catasta, M., Hauswirth, M., & Trninic, D. (2021). Differential benefits of explicit failure-driven and success-driven scaffolding in problem-solving prior to instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 113(3), 530–555. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000483