Productive Struggle Webinar 2 – What is productive struggle?

As part of an NSF-funded project, Guidelines for Designing Challenging and Rewarding Interactive Science Exhibits (DRL-1612577), the Museum of Science, Boston, CAST, EdTogether, and the University of Rochester held a four-part webinar series on “productive struggle,” a mixed emotional experience during which learners persist through negative feelings like confusion and frustration to achieve a satisfying resolution. In this webinar series, members of the team talk through their thinking and methods in designing productive struggle exhibits and also highlight how designing for emotions can create deeper, more inclusive learning experiences.

Our second webinar dove into the construct of productive struggle, describing how our design-based research process helped us refine this concept. We shared data from our studies to elucidate what productive struggle is like in a museum context, and then discussed how productive struggle is similar to and different from other learning theories.