Learning from failure: a meta-analysis of the empirical studies

The authors searched five scholarly databases for a decade of research publications examining learning from failure as an instructional strategy. Out of 187 publications, 62 were found to be relevant to the topic from which only 12 used experimental design to examine the issue and reported statistics appropriate for meta-analysis. The studies also represented only two of our search domains-productive failure and failure-driven memory. The small number of experimental studies on this topic is a telling indication of the state of experimental research in this area. However, they revealed a moderately positive result for the effect of learning from failure. An examination of moderating variables indicated that participants’ grade level, subject matter domain, and study’s duration, while not significant in explaining the differences across the examined studies, showed positive medium effect sizes. Instructional design implications of our findings and limitations of the study are discussed.