Floundering among adult learners in classrooms: Fact or fallacy?

Abstract

Blended pedagogy is an important delivery mechanism for open and distance learning. Here, face-to-face meetings in the blended pedagogy model remain as an important platform for teaching and learning. While there are many instructional techniques employed in faceto- face meetings, there is an urgent need to determine how face-to-face interactions in the blended pedagogy can be elevated to boost students' learning. This paper investigates whether productive failure (PF) as an instructional strategy boosts students' understanding of the subject matter in a face-to-face tutorial. PF instructional design advocates the delaying of support for learners during learning. The more they struggle, and even fail, while trying to master new information, the better they are likely to recall and apply that information later. Current research on the impact of PF treatments has shown that effective learning is achieved when learners are presented with a cycle of low structure, high structure and low structure activities. PF instructional design has been used successfully, especially in secondary schools in which learners have regular contact with the instructor. It is unknown whether the use of PF instructional design among adult learners in face-to-face interaction will yield such a positive effect. Can PF instructional design be used in tutorials that cater for adult learners resulting in fruitful learning outcomes? This paper reports an initial study of a quasi-experiment that compares a “productive failure” instructional design with a traditional “lecture and practice” instructional design for a 2-hour tutorial session attended by adult learners. A total of 17 adult learners participated in the study. Learners experienced either a traditional lecture and practice teaching cycle or a PF cycle, where they solved complex problems in small groups without the provision of any support or scaffolds up until a consolidation lecture by their teacher during the last hour of the tutorial. Findings suggest that learners from the PF condition produced a variety of problem models and methods for solving the problems but were unsuccessful in their efforts, be it in groups or individually. They also reported low confidence in their solutions. Despite failing in their group and individual problem-solving efforts, learners from the PF condition performed better than their counterparts from the lecture and practice condition on both knowledge and higherorder application problems based on the post-test. Implications of PF instructional design for adult learners based on these findings are presented.

Citation

Subramaniam, N.K. and Kandasamy, M. (2013), "Floundering among adult learners in classrooms: Fact or fallacy?", Asian Association of Open Universities Journal, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 33-45. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAOUJ-08-01-2013-B004