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Our own model, trained to tutor the Productive Failure way. It guides students through their attempts instead of solving the problem for them.
Most AI tools hand students the answer. Ours is our own model, fine-tuned to tutor the way Productive Failure teaches: students explore and fail first, and the AI keeps them thinking.
Our own model follows a Productive Failure lesson from exploration to instruction, instead of a general chatbot told to be Socratic.
It asks students to explain their attempts, probes their misconceptions and nudges them on, so the thinking stays theirs.
It comes from our team’s peer-reviewed work on steering AI tutors to follow Productive Failure, with a field study in Singapore classrooms.
Productive Failure comes from 20 years of classroom research. Our team now studies how to make AI tutors teach that way.
Productive Failure was developed by Prof. Manu Kapur of ETH Zurich. In his classroom studies, students who tried a problem before being taught did just as well on the basics. They did better at understanding the concept and using it on problems they hadn’t seen.
A review of 53 studies across the globe found the same, with the biggest gains when lessons followed Productive Failure’s design closely.
Cognition and Instruction · 2008
Students who worked on complex problems before being taught produced weaker solutions at first, then went on to outperform peers who worked on well-structured problems.
Manu Kapur
Educational Psychologist · 2016
Separates how students perform during a lesson from what they learn from it, which gives four kinds of lesson. Failing first, then being taught, can lead to deeper learning than getting it right straight away.
Review of Educational Research · 2021
A meta-analysis found that problem solving before instruction beat instruction first on conceptual understanding and transfer, most of all when lessons followed Productive Failure’s design closely.
When Problem Solving Followed by Instruction Works: Evidence for Productive Failure
Tanmay Sinha, Manu Kapur
Findings of ACL · 2025
A method that keeps an AI tutor on a Productive Failure lesson plan across a whole conversation. In a field study with 17 high school students in Singapore, the tutor kept to the strategy.
Romain Puech, Jakub Mačina, Julia Chatain, Mrinmaya Sachan, Manu Kapur
AI
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