Designing for Productive Persistence After Failure

• In Event: 63.018 - Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

We could not learn without failure. In fact, trial and error may be the most fundamental learning mechanism in nature. It is how babies explore and get to know the world. What tastes good? What hurts? What makes us laugh? We try. We stumble. We revise. We try again. Sometimes we get it. Sometimes we abandon the task. If we only did things we already knew how to do, we would not learn anything. This kind of productive failure is prevalent in children's play and inherent in their games, particularly video games. Failure is the norm in most video games—success is the exception. How many replays does it take to complete a level of Angry Birds successfully? Players experiment with one strategy after another, making adjustments, keeping what works, and discarding what proves to be unsuccessful. It is a wonderful iterative learning process.

Sadly, those same players who show such resilience in games often view failure in school as confirmation of their inability. This dissertation tackles that challenge of how to design learning environments that embrace failure and the benefits of learning from failure. Deep knowledge is more likely to be developed through failures than successes since we are more likely to search for causes for failure than causes for success (for a review, see Weiner, 1985). For instance, research with tutors shows that students learn more from explanations given by tutors after, rather than before, they have experienced a lack of requisite knowledge to solve a given task (VanLehn, Siler, Murray, Yamuachi, & Baggett, 2003). Research in productive failure shows that students are more prepared to learn after they generate several solutions to a complex, open-ended problem even when those solutions are rarely accurate (Kapur, 2008). Finally, work in the area of desirable difficulties provides evidence that instructional manipulations that introduce difficulties can be strategically designed such that they slow down the rate of knowledge acquisition but enhance recall and transfer (Bjork, 2013). This body of work illustrates that learning profits from instances of failure, but to reap those benefits, one must persist in the face of failure.

My research provides insight on how to design learning environments in a manner that elicits productive persistence after failure. Through two projects, I bridge the work in educational psychology, cognition, affective science, and game design to facilitate the study of what influences persistence after failure and how knowledge about those influential factors can inform the development of educational environments. Designing effective instructional games that promote productive persistence goes beyond imposing game elements such as reward points into existing educational tasks or integrating educational elements such as multiple-choice questions into existing games. My research identifies the underlying elements, structures, and contexts that are likely to promote productive persistence in games to investigate how to more effectively apply these elements to the challenges of more formal learning environments.

Author

• Cathy Tran, University of California - Irvine