Research on productive failure suggests that attempting to solve a problem prior to instruction facilitates conceptual understanding compared to receiving instruction prior to problem solving. The assumptions are that during the problem-solving phase, students activate their prior knowledge, become aware of their knowledge gaps, and discover deep…

In this article, I analyze teachers' use of students' everyday knowledge and experiences as resources for learning in educational dialogues. By analyzing video data of teachers' attempts to contextualize instruction in naturalistic settings in a lower secondary school, I examine how teachers use such resources to support and guide student…

A critical assumption made in Kapur's ("Instr Sci" 40:651-672, 2012) productive failure design is that students have the necessary prerequisite knowledge resources to generate and explore solutions to problems before learning the targeted concept. Through two quasi-experimental studies, we interrogated this assumption in the context of…

This study aimed to identify if complementing representations of concrete objects with representations of abstract objects improves students' conceptual understanding as they use a simulation to experiment in the domain of "Light and Color". Moreover, we investigated whether students' prior knowledge is a factor that must be considered in deciding…

Attitudes toward learning (ATL) have been shown to influence students' learning outcomes. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the ways in which the interaction between ATL, the learning situation, and the level of students' prior knowledge influence affective reactions and conceptual change. In this study, a simulation of acid-base…