Group's Response to Design for Productive Failure

• In Event: 35.028 - Failure in the Learning Process: How Learners Experience and Overcome Obstacles Through Resources and Supports

Abstract

Design thinking is difficult to learn even for college students (Dym et al., 2005) and as such poses difficulties for younger learners. Current K-12 engineering curriculum such as Engineering is Elementary (EiE) introduces authentic engineering challenges to teach design process and domain knowledge (Cunningham, 2009). This type of curriculum provides a scripted design process to follow and assesses students’ understanding of engineering concepts using objective questioning method such as multiple choices and fill-in-the-blank (Cunningham, 2009; Lachapelle & Cunningham, 2007). Direct instruction of this kind ensures effective short-term learning, but does not support long-term learning (Bjork, 1994).

To maximize long-term learning outcomes, scholars propose to increase learning difficulties as an alternative strategy. Approaches such as “desired difficulties” (Bjork, 1994), “productive failure” (Kapur, 2008), and “invent-with-contrasting-cases” (Schwartz, Chase, Oppezzo, & Chin, 2011) maintain that allowing students to fail before providing guided instruction increases learning and transfer. Failure provides valuable experiences to unpack and model abstract design principles with students and reflect on them (Borge, Shimoda, Yan, & Toprani, 2016; Toprani, Borge, & Xia, 2018).

We created a curricular unit in an afterschool design club that built on Kapur and Bielaczyc’s (2011) designing for Productive Failure approach that provides students with opportunities to fail and reflect. The data in this poster came from a 2017 study where we designed and tested self-evaluation tools for students’ design projects: an evaluation video, a client needs checklist, and reflection questions to help students learn from failure. Sixteen students recruited in the club were assigned into four groups, one expert group and three novice groups. Expert group students had engaged in several rounds of the design curriculum. We collected around 70 hours’ video data, field notes, and design artifacts in total. We used interaction analysis techniques to analyze group’ response to the evaluation tools from two lessons (Jordan & Henderson, 1995).

We found that both expert and novice groups avoided failure during design evaluation. They actively looked for evidence from design plans to justify how their design meets clients’ needs; some of the evidence offered weak to no support for their claim. Both groups did not critically evaluate their designs so as to improve them. When asked to reflect on their design process, the expert group was able to orient their discussion around design strategies they can implement in the future. The novice group either oriented their discussion around a specific client’ need they failed to meet or didn’t reflect at all. Facilitator’s questioning on groups’ design evaluation pushed them to evaluate designs more critically. With facilitator support, novice groups were able to overcome some collaboration and project management challenges. The findings indicate that students’ failure negative mindset hinders their ability to improve their design. Also, all groups have potential to perform higher level skills if they are given enough time and appropriate support from facilitator during development. The findings imply that we need to develop a design process learning framework which includes the alignment among failure positive mindset, classroom culture, curriculum design, and facilitator support moves.

Authors

• Shulong Yan, The Pennsylvania State University

• Marcela Borge, The Pennsylvania State University