Failure and Improvement in Elementary Engineering

Recent science education reform documents in the United States have called for teachers to teach content related to engineering and science and to do so by engaging students in disciplinary practices. One important practice of engineering is improving from failure. Thus, students should experience productive failure as part of engineering design activities. However, engineering is a new subject for most elementary teachers. Historically failure has had negative connotations in elementary and precollege classrooms. To scaffold students through failure as they learn from and improve engineering designs, teachers will need to understand failure and pedagogical strategies for managing it. This study uses discourse analysis of video from eight elementary classes engaged in engineering to examine the nature of failure in engineering design projects. It also investigates how the collective actions of students and teachers support or constrain the process of improvement from engineering design failure. From these data, we propose a model of improvement through failure. This includes a classification of types and causes failure as well as facilitating conditions that must be present for improvement. We explore three features of engineering and three features of classroom cultures that contribute to learning to engage in productive failure.

Learning From Errors: Exploring the Effectiveness of Enhanced Error Messages in Learning to Program

Error messages provided by the programming environments are often cryptic and confusing to learners. This study explored the effectiveness of enhanced programming error messages (EPEMs) in a Python-based introductory programming course. Participants were two groups of middle school students. The control group only received raw programming error messages (RPEMs) and had 35 students. The treatment group received EPEMs and had 33 students. During the class, students used an automated assessment tool called Mulberry to practice their programming skill. Mulberry automatically collected all the solutions students submitted when solving programming problems. Data analysis was based on 6339 student solutions collected by Mulberry. Our results showed that EPEMs did not help to reduce student errors or improve students’ performance in debugging. The ineffectiveness of EPEMs may result from reasons such as the inaccuracy of the interpreter’s error messages or students not reading the EPEMs. However, the viewpoint of productive failure may provide a better explanation of the ineffectiveness of EPEMs. The failures in coding and difficulties in debugging can be resources for learning. We recommend that researchers reconsider the role of errors in code and investigate whether and how failures and debugging contribute to the learning of programming.

Productive Failures: From Class Requirement to Fostering a Support Group

Mistakes occur frequently in mathematics. Reframing mistakes into positive moments can be psychologically important in a student’s educational journey. We investigated two tertiary math classes that explicitly valued mistakes through a pedagogical requirement called “productive failure”. For a percentage of their grade, students demonstrated how they made mistakes in their problem solving and, most importantly, how they overcame those mistakes. Through interviews, video-stimulated recalls, and evaluations of the course all from students, we initially looked for affectual responses to the pedagogical allowance and student-led demonstration. Many of the responses, both benefits and drawbacks of the productive failure, were interpreted by the research group to resemble the psychology literature on peer-led support groups. Descriptions of both productive failure and support groups, as well as quotes from the students, aim to shed light on psychological benefits of valuing mistakes. Finally, we believe that productive failures benefitted many students because it made the human aspect of mathematics more explicit.