Embodied Productive Failure

Introduction

Productive Failure is an instructional design where problem-solving is crucial: students attempt to solve a deliberately challenging problem and typically fail to find the correct solution on their own. This phase should then prepare them to better understand the subsequent lecture. The variety and number of solutions generated by students usually determines how well prepared they are for the lecture, and thus, how much they will learn. This raises the question of how we can support students in generating solutions.

Research in the field of embodied learning indicates that incorporating sensorimotor resources such as gestures, movements or object manipulations into the learning process can lead to new insights and ideas. Most importantly, these studies suggest that alignment (i.e. “congruence”) between movement and concept is crucial to foster enhanced intuition and insight regarding the concept. Moreover, embodied environments afford opportunities to explore and interact with the concept in novel and unconventional ways. In sum, sensorimotor resources potentially provide students with alternative and complementary tools to develop and express their ideas for solving the problem.

Integrating sensorimotor resources based on embodied learning principles and mechanisms into the Productive Failure framework is a potential pathway to support students in generating a higher diversity of solutions. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate how the incorporation of meaningful gestures into the learning activity as preparation for the problem-solving process affects students’ solution exploration and learning outcomes.

Research Question

How does the integration of sensorimotor resources affect students’ generation of solutions and learning outcomes in Productive Failure?

Team

Laura Bock, Julia Chatain, Rudolf Varga, Manu Kapur