Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto, 144 College Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3M2, Canada.
The Wilson Centre, University of Toronto and University Health Network, Toronto, Canada.
Adv Health Sci Educ Theory Pract. 2020 Dec;25(5):1099-1106. doi: 10.1007/s10459-020-10013-y. Epub 2020 Nov 12.
Advances in Health Sciences Education (AHSE) has been at the forefront of the cognitive wave in health professions education for the past 25 years. One example is research on productive failure, a teaching strategy that asks learners to attempt to generate solutions to difficult problems before receiving instruction. This study compared the effectiveness of productive failure with indirect failure to further characterize the underpinning cognitive mechanisms of productive failure. Year one pharmacy students (N = 42) were randomly assigned to a productive failure or an indirect failure learning condition. The problem of estimating renal function based on serum creatinine was described to participants in the productive failure learning condition, who were then asked to generate a solution. Participants in the indirect failure condition learned about the same problem and were given incorrect solutions that other students had created, as well as the Cockcroft-Gault formula, and asked to compare and contrast the equations. Immediately thereafter all participants completed a series of tests designed to assess acquisition, application, and preparation for future learning (PFL). The tests were repeated after a 1-week delay. Participants in the productive failure condition outperformed those in the indirect failure condition, both on the immediate PFL assessment, and after a 1-week delay. These results emphasize the crucial role of generation in learning. When preparing novice students to learn new knowledge in the future, generating solutions to problems prior to instruction may be more effective than simply learning about someone else's mistakes. Struggle and failure are most productive when experienced personally by a learner because it requires the learner to engage in generation, which deepens conceptual understanding.
健康科学教育（AHSE）在过去 25 年一直处于医疗专业教育认知浪潮的前沿。例如，关于生产性失败的研究是一种教学策略，它要求学习者在接受指导之前尝试生成解决难题的方法。本研究比较了生产性失败和间接失败的有效性，以进一步描述生产性失败的潜在认知机制。第一年药学专业的学生（N=42）被随机分配到生产性失败或间接失败的学习条件中。在生产性失败的学习条件中，向参与者描述了基于血清肌酐估算肾功能的问题，然后要求他们生成解决方案。在间接失败的条件下，参与者学习了相同的问题，并获得了其他学生生成的错误解决方案以及 Cockcroft-Gault 公式，并被要求对这些方程进行比较和对比。之后，所有参与者立即完成了一系列旨在评估获取、应用和为未来学习做准备（PFL）的测试。在一周的延迟后重复进行这些测试。在即时 PFL 评估和一周延迟后，生产性失败组的参与者表现优于间接失败组的参与者。这些结果强调了生成在学习中的关键作用。在为未来的新学习准备新手学生时，在教学之前生成问题的解决方案可能比简单地了解他人的错误更有效。当学习者个人经历挣扎和失败时，它最富有成效，因为它要求学习者进行生成，从而加深对概念的理解。
