Productive Failure In Mathematics Teaching Of Junior Middle School Supported By Social Media Software

Produtive failure(PF)is a learning design theory put forward by Manu Kapur that affords students opportunities to generate representations and solusions to a novel problem that targets a concept they have not learned yet,followed by consolidation and knowledge assembly where they learn the targeted concept.This concept contains four essential attribute: efficacy which means the hidden efficacy of failure,failure which means that students will typically be unable to generate or discover the correct solution(s)by themselves,no cognitive support or scaffolds which means the teacher will offer students no cognitive help during the genertation and exploration phase,and delaying instruction,i.e.not take the instruction as the first step of teaching.Compared with the widely accepted direct instruction,PF is a subversive innovation both in teaching process and teaching phylosopy.However,there are precious few scholars have given attention to this theory in our country,let alone put it into teaching.In this study,with the guidance of the productive failure,the researcher designed the process of productive failure in mathematics teaching of junior middle school supported by social media software together with the participation principles of teachers and students accodding to the Manu Kapur's design and the actual need of teaching in our country,and put it into a teaching practice for one semester in order to explore its influences on the solution diversity,learning interest,time input,cognitive load and scores of students as well as the value of social media software teaching through observation,communication,students' work,questionnaire and the analysis of scores.During the practice,the researcher found that the productive failure teaching supported with social media can increase students' solution diversity and learning interest while did not significantly change the learining time input and kept moderate congnitive load of most students.Though it had a high degree of adaptability and efficacy in geometry teaching,it cannot improve the accuracy of students' calculation in algebra teaching.In addition,it took much more time of the teacher.What's more,the researcher describe every step of the practice in details,such as the activity design of generation and exploration,the student-genenrated solutions,the instruction way of the teacher,the application of social media and a integrated teaching example,in order to truthfully present the work of researcher,and,more importantly,provide some reference to for other researchers.Due to the limited reseach time,the unfavorable factors in the research process and the limitations of the researcher,this research is of some insufficiency.The researcher is open to criticisms and suggestions with an expectation that some scholars and professionals can spare some attention to this field to value the desirable failure,deepen the study of productive failure,improve the PF teaching approach and promote the application of this theory in our teaching.