Exploring The Use Of Productive Failure In STEM Learning Activity: A Design-based Research Study

STEM education is an important vehicle for the training of scientific and technological innovation talents,and its educational effectiveness depends on whether students truly experience the problem-solving process and whether effective learning occurs in this process.However,in the current STEM education in China,there is a tendency to emphasize success over failure in STEM education,and since failure plays an important role in promoting problem-solving skills and creative thinking,it is important to explore the use of failure in designing and implementing STEM learning activities.Manu Kapur advocates that the failure during the learning process could lead students learn through problem-solving,and proposed Productive Failure.Productive Failure is compatible with STEM learning,and they can be implemented in a mutually reinforcing and synergistic way.The purpose of this study is using Productive Failure in middle school STEM learning activity design to enhance student learning.Based on this,this study applied design-based research,implemented three iterations of learning activities and analyzed the data of learning process and results.The results show that: STEM learning activities using Productive Failure can promote students’ effective learning,as evidenced by students’ diversity of representations and solution methods,and improved learning transfer after the learning activities.Diverse representations and solution methods guide students to explore learning concepts,generating Productive Failure.The static characteristic of the learning process is: solution refinement and problem exploration are students’ main behaviors;as for the dynamic characteristic,the student groups generate four behavior patterns: analysis-oriented,intertwined,solution-oriented,and process-directed.Finally,this study summarizes the practical insights of productive failure in the design and implementation of STEM learning activities.