Rewards that Come with Failure

Effective learning is crucial in the training of future health care professionals. At UHN, researchers at The Institute for Education Research (TIER) are investigating ways to improve learning outcomes.

One of the most effective teaching strategies is known as productive failure. This is when learners are asked to invent a solution by themselves before they are provided a solution. An example of this strategy would be to ask students to invent an equation to that describes a straight line before providing them with the solution (i.e., y=mx+b). Productive failure is particularly useful for improving how we learn, so that we become more creative and flexible problem-solvers.

“Class activities based on productive failure are often more difficult to design; furthermore, such activities are tough for students because they are being asked to work on a task that they will likely ultimately fail,” says Naomi Steenhof, Education Investigator at TIER.

“Naturally we wondered: Is it really worth the effort? And is it necessary to put the learners through this?”

To determine whether experiencing failure helps health care professionals to learn better, Ms. Steenhof and her colleagues tested two teaching methods with a group of pharmacy students.

For the same learning activity, half of the group was asked to come up with a solution prior to being taught the answer—i.e., the productive failure strategy. The other half was asked to contrast the correct solution with incorrect ones from past students—a strategy that the researchers referred to as indirect failure.

The two groups showed similar performance when they were tested on the concepts that they had just learned. However, when asked to learn a new related concept, students in the productive failure group performed better than those in the indirect failure group. “The struggle that they had experienced in the learning activity had improved their ability to learn,” says Ms. Steenhof.

Quizzes and exams are designed to evaluate how well the students understand the concepts taught in class. However, students often memorize the course material then forget the knowledge soon after.

“Good performance on a test does not always translate to learning, and poor performance does not mean that learning has not occurred,” cautions Ms. Steenhof. “Performance and learning are not the same, and we should focus more on learning when evaluating overall learner success.”

This work was supported by the Toronto General & Western Hospital Foundation.

Steenhof N, Woods NN, Mylopoulos M. Exploring why we learn from productive failure: insights from the cognitive and learning sciences. Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 2020 Dec. doi: 10.1007/s10459-020-10013-y.