Productive Struggle
Building Toward Independent Practice
Learning complex material requires students to do intellectual work for themselves. They have to decide how to begin, connect ideas, test an interpretation, make choices when several approaches seem plausible, recognize when a line of reasoning has failed, and decide what to try next. Those capabilities develop through experience carrying increasingly consequential parts of the work.
I think of productive struggle in terms of how much of that intellectual work remains meaningfully with the learner. An instructor may explain, model, prompt, question, demonstrate, or temporarily carry portions of reasoning that a student cannot yet manage. The instructional judgment concerns what the learner can productively carry now and what they should gradually become capable of carrying independently.
Research on scaffolding, instructional assistance, worked examples, confusion, and cognitive load supports this developmental view of support (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007; Lodge et al., 2018; van de Pol et al., 2010). Learners often need substantial guidance when knowledge is new, with the form and amount of assistance changing as their understanding develops. The longer-term goal is independent practice in which students increasingly organize, monitor, and evaluate their own reasoning.
When Difficulty Serves Learning
Difficulty can arise for many reasons. Some difficulty comes directly from the intellectual work students are learning to perform: coordinating several ideas, deciding among plausible approaches, working through uncertainty, or revising an interpretation after encountering conflicting evidence. Other difficulty can consume effort while leaving the learner with little basis for productive progress.
Research on productive struggle reflects this variation. Classroom studies show that students can respond to challenging problems in different ways and that the course of struggle matters for what they are able to learn from it (Warshauer, 2015). Reviews of the literature likewise show considerable variation in how productive struggle has been defined and studied (Young et al., 2024).
Research on confusion provides a similar picture. Discovering that an existing explanation no longer works can create an opportunity for deeper processing, especially when the learner has enough knowledge and guidance to examine the discrepancy. Confusion can also persist without producing greater understanding when students lack the resources needed to resolve it (Lodge et al., 2018). The educational value of difficulty therefore depends on what students are doing intellectually while they experience it.
Productive-failure research offers a useful example. Students can benefit from attempting unfamiliar problems before formal instruction when the sequence gives their initial reasoning a productive role in later learning. Sinha and Kapur’s (2021) meta-analysis found benefits for problem solving followed by instruction under appropriate conditions. The initial work matters because students generate, compare, and revise ideas that subsequent instruction can help them organize.
Matching Assistance to Learner Capability
The amount of assistance students receive changes what intellectual work remains theirs to perform. Koedinger and Aleven (2007) describe this problem as the assistance dilemma: learners need enough support to make productive progress while still performing reasoning they need to develop for themselves.
This tension is especially important in quantitative instruction. If I select the statistical procedure for a student, the immediate problem may be completed successfully while the student gets little practice deciding which features of a new problem matter. If I identify every error as soon as it appears, the student receives a correct solution but fewer opportunities to monitor their own work. Assistance changes the task because it changes which decisions remain in the learner’s hands.
Substantial guidance can be appropriate when students are building new knowledge. Worked examples allow novices to study how a solution proceeds without devoting all of their available cognitive resources to searching for a path forward, and meta-analytic evidence supports their value for mathematics performance (Barbieri et al., 2023). Renkl and Atkinson (2003) describe a progression in which learners move from complete examples toward increasingly independent problem solving as portions of the solution are gradually removed.
The expertise-reversal literature reinforces the same developmental principle. Supports that are useful when knowledge is limited can become redundant as expertise increases (Kalyuga et al., 2003). More recent meta-analytic evidence similarly indicates that learners with lower prior knowledge tend to benefit from greater assistance, while learners with greater prior knowledge often benefit from conditions requiring more independent performance (Tetzlaff et al., 2025). Effective assistance therefore depends partly on what the learner is already capable of doing.
Transferring Responsibility
Scaffolding research makes the developmental direction of assistance especially clear. Van de Pol et al. (2010) identify contingency, fading, and transfer of responsibility as central characteristics of scaffolding. Support responds to the learner’s current understanding, changes as competence develops, and gradually returns cognitive and metacognitive work to the learner.
I find the idea of transfer of responsibility particularly useful in my teaching. A student may initially need me to demonstrate how to begin a problem. Once that starting point is understood, I can leave the next decision to the student. A learner who can perform a calculation independently may still need help interpreting its meaning, while another learner may understand the interpretation and need practice deciding when the method applies.
The important question is which part of the work support is currently carrying. As students develop, explanation can give way to prompts, prompts to questions, and questions to opportunities for independent action. The change in assistance reflects a change in what the learner can now manage.
Self-monitoring belongs to this transfer as well. Students need opportunities to notice when their work is going wrong, decide whether a strategy needs revision, and attempt a repair before a solution is supplied. Support can enter when the learner lacks a productive route forward, while preserving opportunities for students to exercise judgment they are already capable of exercising.
Over time, responsibility expands beyond executing procedures. Students begin deciding how to approach a problem, which information matters, when a strategy is failing, what kind of help would be useful, and whether a completed solution is defensible. Those decisions are part of the capability instruction is intended to develop.
Preparing for Independent Practice
Highly supported performance provides useful evidence about what students can do with assistance. Independent practice provides different evidence because more of the planning, monitoring, and decision making belongs to the learner.
In unfamiliar work, students have to determine how to proceed without prompts identifying every consequential choice. They may have to choose among several plausible approaches, decide whether a result is reasonable, recognize when they need additional information, and determine whether an initial strategy deserves revision. These decisions require knowledge, but they also require experience using that knowledge without continuous instructional direction.
Instruction can prepare students for this responsibility gradually. Early in learning, I may carry substantial portions of a problem so students can participate in work they could not yet organize alone. As their understanding develops, I can leave more decisions with them and observe what they do with that responsibility. External questions can become questions students learn to ask themselves, and instructor monitoring can gradually become self-monitoring.
Independent practice also includes knowing when assistance is needed. Expertise does not require solving every problem in isolation. Researchers consult colleagues, documentation, prior work, and methodological resources. The important capability is recognizing what one understands, where the difficulty lies, what kind of support would move the work forward, and what decisions still belong to the learner.
For me, this is the educational value of productive struggle. Students develop through opportunities to carry intellectual work that is within reach while receiving support for work they cannot yet manage independently. As their knowledge grows, responsibility grows with it. The aim is for students to leave instruction increasingly able to initiate, monitor, evaluate, and revise their own reasoning when the structures that first supported them are no longer immediately available.
References
Barbieri, C. A., Miller-Cotto, D., Clerjuste, S. N., & Chawla, K. (2023). A meta-analysis of the worked examples effect on mathematics performance. Educational Psychology Review, 35, Article 35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09745-1
Kalyuga, S., Ayres, P., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (2003). The expertise reversal effect. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 23–31. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_4
Koedinger, K. R., & Aleven, V. (2007). Exploring the assistance dilemma in experiments with Cognitive Tutors. Educational Psychology Review, 19(3), 239–264. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-007-9049-0
Lodge, J. M., Kennedy, G., Lockyer, L., Arguel, A., & Pachman, M. (2018). Understanding difficulties and resulting confusion in learning: An integrative review. Frontiers in Education, 3, Article 49. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2018.00049
Renkl, A., & Atkinson, R. K. (2003). Structuring the transition from example study to problem solving in cognitive skill acquisition: A cognitive load perspective. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 15–22. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_3
Sinha, T., & Kapur, M. (2021). When problem solving followed by instruction works: Evidence for productive failure. Review of Educational Research, 91(5), 761–798. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211019105
Tetzlaff, L., Simonsmeier, B. A., Peters, T., & Brod, G. (2025). A cornerstone of adaptivity: A meta-analysis of the expertise reversal effect. Learning and Instruction, 98, Article 102142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2025.102142
van de Pol, J., Volman, M., & Beishuizen, J. (2010). Scaffolding in teacher–student interaction: A decade of research. Educational Psychology Review, 22(3), 271–296. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-010-9127-6
Warshauer, H. K. (2015). Productive struggle in middle school mathematics classrooms. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 18(4), 375–400. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10857-014-9286-3
Young, J. R., Bevan, D., & Sanders, M. (2024). How productive is the productive struggle? Lessons learned from a scoping review. International Journal of Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology, 12(2), 470–495. https://doi.org/10.46328/ijemst.3364