Understanding Learning from Failure Process in the Collaborative Design Context PDF Download

Author: Shulong Yan
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Languages : en
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Book Description
Failure as a path to success is a common belief in literature, our daily life, and educational research. With the advocate of integrating design into K-12 education, scholars who study Maker Movement have argued that involving learners in design practice can foster a positive failure mindset. To make failure productive, scholars have suggested the need to actively create a learning environment, provide opportunities to practice, and build the culture to support this learning process. However, examining the literature, few studies have focused on unpacking learning through the lens of failure in the design context. As design is naturally collaborative, it is also essential to examine design from a group's perspective. Synthesizing from the needs and the challenges from literature, this study focused on understanding group-level learning from failure phenomenon in the collaborative design context. Drawing from a sociocultural learning perspective, I focused my analysis on understanding how learning from failure is mediated by two tools -- discourse and physical artifact. To guide the analysis, I proposed two research questions: 1) How does a specific discourse pattern mediate a team's opportunity and ability to learn from failure in the collaborative design context? 2) How does the tool configuration mediate teams to learn from failure in the collaborative design context? To answer these two questions, I used the design experiment method to develop a learning space informed by three design principles synthesized from literature. This study recruited 16 students, and they were divided into four teams. As four students were returning students, I decided to group them as an expert team. I followed the interaction analysis approach to select lessons and episodes for analysis from over 75 hours of data in the data analysis. I used discourse analysis and interaction analysis separately to examine the two research questions. In the analysis, I focused on understanding how the moment-to-moment discourse and tool interaction among team members mediate learning from failure. The findings showed that learners could engage in sophisticated design practices and reasoning. However, their discourse patterns influenced their team's ability to learn from failure. The findings also showed that tools played an essential role in mediating the team's learning process. However, each tool can support and at the same time constrain the learning process depending on the relationship between the learners and the tools. This dissertation findings bring both theoretical and design implications. This study calls for reconceptualizing failure and learning from failure in the collaborative design context from a gap between expected and actual performance to a situational and momentary socio-material interaction phenomenon. This study also provided several design iteration suggestions based on the findings.