Learners who lack knowledge often also lack the ability to assess their limited competence correctly. Due to the incorrect self-assessment, they are unlikely to apply strategies that would help them to acquire relevant knowledge. This effect is known as the double curse of incompetence. When students solve problems prior to being taught the…

I advance a theoretically and empirically-grounded case for designing for and learning from failure, and instantiate it in a learning design called Productive Failure (PF). I describe the key mechanisms and the design principles of PF. The PF learning design comprises a generation and exploration phase followed by a consolidation and knowledge…