Students in first-year university courses often focus on mimicking application of taught procedures and fail to gain adequate conceptual understanding. One potential approach to support meaningful learning is Productive Failure (PF). In PF, the conventional instruction process is reversed so that learners attempt to solve challenging problems ahead of receiving explicit instruction. While students often fail to produce satisfactory solutions (hence “Failure”), these attempts help learners encode key features and learn better from subsequent instruction (hence “Productive”). Effectiveness of PF was shown mainly in the context of statistical and intuitive concepts, and lessons that are designed and taught by learning scientists. We describe a quasi-experiment that evaluates the impact of PF in a large-enrollment introductory university-level biology course when designed and implemented by the course instructors. One course-section (295 students) learned two topics using PF; another section (279 students) learned the same topics using an active learning approach, which is the standard in this course. Performance was assessed on the subsequent midterm exam, after all students had ample opportunities for practice and feedback, and after some time has elapsed. PF students scored nearly five percentage-points higher on the relevant topics in the subsequent midterm exam. The effect was especially strong for low-performing students. Improvement on the final exam was only visible for low-performing students. We describe the intervention and its potential to transform large introductory university courses.

一年级大学课程的学生通常侧重于模仿所教程序的应用，而没有获得足够的概念性理解。一种支持有意义学习的潜在方法是生产性失败（PF）。在PF中，传统的教学过程是相反的，因此学习者会在接收明确的教学之前尝试解决具有挑战性的问题。尽管学生通常无法提供令人满意的解决方案（因此称为“失败”），但这些尝试可帮助学习者对关键特征进行编码，并从后续的指导中学习得更好（因此称为“有效”）。PF的有效性主要在统计和直观概念以及由学习型科学家设计和教授的课程的背景下显示。我们描述了一个准实验，该实验可以在课程讲师设计和实施时评估PF在大学生入门级生物学水平课程中的影响。一个课程部分（295名学生）使用PF学习了两个主题；另一部分（279名学生）使用主动学习方法学习了相同的主题，这是本课程的标准。在所有学生都有足够的练习和反馈机会之后，并且经过一段时间后，在随后的期中考试中评估了表现。在随后的期中考试中，PF学生在相关主题上的得分提高了近5个百分点。对于成绩不佳的学生，这种影响尤其明显。只有成绩不佳的学生才能看到期末考试的改进。