Is having more prerequisite knowledge better for learning from productive failure?

Exploratory learning activities in the physics classroom: contrasting cases versus a rich dataset.

“…In addition, it was hypothesized that interest and enjoyment and cognitive load would be equal or higher in the EF group (i.e. Toh & Kapur, 2017;Weaver et al, 2018). It was also hypothesized that all of the process measures (interest and enjoyment, cognitive load, and success on the activity) would predict learning outcomes.…”

“…The large amount of data in RD activities also presents more opportunities for students to try out methods from prior knowledge to accomplish the goal. The number of student-generated representations and solution methods is often reported to be a significant predictor of performance outcomes (Kapur, 2012(Kapur, , 2014Toh & Kapur, 2017).…”

“…Exploratory learning conditions have been shown to increase learners' cognitive load (Kapur, 2014;Newman & DeCaro, 2019;Toh & Kapur, 2017). Cognitive load is the mental effort needed to perform a task (Paas, 1992).…”

“…Process level hypotheses were based on previous exploratory learning research with RD activities (i.e., Glogger-Frey et al, 2015;Toh & Kapur, 2017;Weaver et al, 2018): interest and enjoyment, knowledge gap awareness, and cognitive load were expected to be equal or higher in the EF-RD condition than the IF-RD condition. In addition, interest and enjoyment, knowledge gap awareness, cognitive load, and number of strategies generated during the activity for students in the EF-RD condition were expected to predict learning outcomes.…”

Student Emotions in a Productive Failure Paradigm

“…This latter aspect was investigated by Manu Kapur and colleagues (2008;2012;2016) using the productive failure paradigm. Most of these studies involve the domain of mathematics (Kapur, 2008;2012) but there is some work that examines productive failure in other domains like physics and biology (Kapur & Kinzer, 2009;Toh & Kapur, 2017).…”