DIY productive failure: boosting performance in a large undergraduate biology course

Students in first-year university courses often focus on mimicking application of taught procedures and fail to gain adequate conceptual understanding. One potential approach to support meaningful learning is Productive Failure (PF). In PF, the conventional instruction process is reversed so that learners attempt to solve challenging problems ahead of receiving explicit instruction. While students often fail to produce satisfactory solutions (hence “Failure”), these attempts help learners encode key features and learn better from subsequent instruction (hence “Productive”). Effectiveness of PF was shown mainly in the context of statistical and intuitive concepts, and lessons that are designed and taught by learning scientists. We describe a quasi-experiment that evaluates the impact of PF in a large-enrollment introductory university-level biology course when designed and implemented by the course instructors. One course-section (295 students) learned two topics using PF; another section (279 students) learned the same topics using an active learning approach, which is the standard in this course. Performance was assessed on the subsequent midterm exam, after all students had ample opportunities for practice and feedback, and after some time has elapsed. PF students scored nearly five percentage-points higher on the relevant topics in the subsequent midterm exam. The effect was especially strong for low-performing students. Improvement on the final exam was only visible for low-performing students. We describe the intervention and its potential to transform large introductory university courses.