Huang, David Junsong

Productive Failure1,2 studies have shown that working on generative and complex activities prepares students for learning from subsequent instruction (i.e., delayed instruction). Under a delayed instruction setting, this study investigated the degree of freedom of generation and the level of task complexity as two key attributes of a preparatory task. The purpose was to make preliminary exploration on whether there is a boundary at which the benefit of a more generative task over a less generative task, such as compare and contrast, may disappear when the task complexity reduces.