Why giving students a chance to 'fail' improves their learning

Bigger Gains for Students Who Don’t Get Help Solving Problems
By Annie Murphy Paul
February 25, 2014

Allowing learners to struggle will actually help them learn better, according to research on "productive failure" conducted by Manu Kapur, a researcher at the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Institute of Education of Singapore. Kapur's investigations find that while the model adopted by many teachers and employers when introducing others to new knowledge — providing lots of structure and guidance early on, until the students or workers show that they can do it on their own — makes intuitive sense, it's not the best way to promote learning. Rather, it's better to let neophytes wrestle with the material on their own for a while, refraining from giving them any assistance at the start.

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http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/02/bigger-gains-for-students-who-dont-have-help-solving-problems-struggle-to-learn/