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Preparing your learning experience
Students try a problem before they’re taught how to solve it. The teaching then connects their attempts to the concept and method. Developed by Prof. Manu Kapur, this approach has been studied in classrooms since 2006.
You’ve seen it happen. A student gets the practice questions right, but change the wording or ask them to explain, and they’re stuck. They struggle to remember, understand and transfer what they learnt.
Teachers explain it again, set more practice and spend another lesson on the same ground. Students who keep getting stuck start to believe they’re bad at maths. And it’s still hard to tell which ideas have clicked.
Students explore a problem before learning the method, with our PF-trained AI asking them to explain their ideas. The lesson then connects their attempts to the concept. Teachers see how each student approached it, so they know what to teach next.
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
For teachers
A 15-minute orientation that teaches Productive Failure the way it works: you try a problem first and get the explanation second, just as your students will. No sign-up.
See what LearnPF can do for your school today.
Meet with our team to:
