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Home / 2019 / December / 17 / Productive Failure in biology classrooms

Productive Failure in biology classrooms

December 17, 2019

Project Investigator(s): Sunita Chowrira, Professor of Teaching, Botany; Karen Smith, Lecturer, Microbiology

Project Description

Students were required to complete various learning activities (readings, quizzes, worksheets and problems) in a specific sequence i.e., pre-class, in-class, post-class.

Research Questions

Are all in-class activities created equal? Will all in-class activities lead to learning gains? What kind of activities are best suited for a given topic?

Objectives achieved

“We performed a quasi-experiment that evaluated the impact of PF in a large-enrollment introductory university-level biology course. 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.”

Posted in Awarded Projects
Tagged with Experiential Learning

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