Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Productive Failure (PF) is a learning design that intentionallydesigns for and uses failure in preparatory problem-solving forlearning. Over the past decade, there has been growing ev-idence supporting the effectiveness of learning from PF. Thepurpose of this paper, however, is to critically examine evi-dence for when PF fails. We analyze 95 experimental compar-isons from 57 studies reported in 44 articles into the extent towhich they conform to PF design criteria. These criteria, asoutlined in the original PF work, span the problem-solving ac-tivity, the participation structures, and the social surround. Re-sults suggest lack of design fidelity as a critical factor for whenPF fails to outperform alternative instructional approaches onconceptual knowledge and/or transfer.