EPSY 408 broadly covers the history and practice of educational psychology. One principle within educational psychology is the idea of productive struggle - where students must be challenged beyond their immediate understanding in order to form new understandings. This paper will examine productive struggle in the context of a large enrollment class. In addition, the productive struggle can be closely tied to ideas of Social Cognitivism whereby students learn through social engagement. These two ideas together form the basis of the “Struggle Together” approach to collaborative problem-solving.

I teach computer science at the university level and have taught both small classes and large classes. While I am a firm believer in the need for productive struggle, particularly in computer science education, I have personally found it challenging to use it effectively in large enrollment classes (my own productive struggle). With this work and research, I hope to uncover useful insights into this area that can be used to improve my own teaching and explore ways of integrating productive struggle into large enrollment classes.

George Reese (2017) distinguishes between the concept of “scaffolding” which educators use to help students build toward the desired outcome, and “crutches” where students are given too much support and direction and ultimately do not learn to solve problems on their own (and worse, may become frustrated when encountering new types of problems that they feel unprepared for).

According to the video below, students, unfortunately, gravitate towards passive learning such as listening to lectures and highlighting readings and need to be directly encouraged to move to more active learning such as solving problems.

Edutopia, 2021

When students experience productive struggle, where they attempt to solve problems that they do not immediately know how to solve, improves students’ retention of more of their learning and they ultimately gain a better understanding of the subject matter.

Renaissance EdWords (2022) offers the following definition: “Productive struggle is developing strong habits of mind, such as perseverance and thinking flexibly, instead of simply seeking the correct solution. Not knowing how to solve a problem at the outset should be expected.”

Renaissance EdWords, 2022

This paper will focus on Productive Struggle within Large Enrollment classes. What constitutes “large enrollment” varies by institution and by age range of students. For the purposes of this paper, large enrollment will refer to university classes of 200 or more students.

Productive struggle is an important aspect of developing problem-solving skills and is particularly integral to the learning of mathematics and computer science. Russo, Bobis, Downton, Livy, & Sullivan (2021) argue that offering opportunities for productive struggle lead students to develop a growth mindset and to believe that they can succeed through perseverance.

According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, “effective mathematics teaching supports students in struggling productively as they learn mathematics.” (Leinwand, Brahier, & Huinker, 2014).

Ying‐Chih Chen (2022) further points out that uncertainty is a part of scientific exploration, and when teaching STEM subjects “students should engage in authentic science practices to develop their own knowledge.” Chen breaks this uncertainty into four phases.

Through these phases, the learner progresses from having only a basic understanding to being able to apply the concept. Phase 2 in particular focuses on struggle, failure, and opportunity for growth.

According to Murdoch, English, Hintz, & Tyson (2020), we can distinguish between productive and unproductive struggle, where the unproductive struggle is the result when students are given too much explicit direction, leading them to memorize how to get a solution rather than understanding the process, and to become distressed when they cannot solve a new problem. This ties back to George Reese’s concept of crutches vs. scaffolding.

Murdoch, English, Hintz, & Tyson (2020) further point out that it is a desirable outcome for students to learn to solve problems they haven’t previously encountered, not by following a memorized sequence of steps but by trying to understand the problem and exploring potential solutions. (Murdoch, English, Hintz, & Tyson, 2020)

When educators embrace the productive struggle, they should expect that students won’t know how to solve a problem immediately, and for some students this may be intimidating, potentially leading to an unproductive struggle. One suggestion from Cowen (2016) for turning unproductive struggle into productive struggle is to offer alternate points of entry, rather than falling back on direct instructions or hints. “In one third-grade classroom, for example, students were asked to find ways to make 36 cents. When one student was confounded, her teacher suggested quietly, ‘Start by writing down the values of each coin. Remember, we discussed them in the morning meeting yesterday.’ (She could also have suggested that the student start with only pennies or with three dimes.)” (Cowen, 2016)

Another aspect to consider is how to get students to a place where they are willing to take on the struggle. Michael Giardi (2018) explains the importance of a good hook – a prompt that allows students to investigate, while simultaneously generating conversation among the students. The hook helps to entice the students to be curious enough to explore the problem.

Giardi, 2018

The example above shows how a visualization of a problem can act as a hook, bringing out the students’ natural curiosity, and opening the door for a conversation where students can share ideas and ask questions.

There are many challenges with large classes – the sheer volume of students creates a lot of need for management and logistics and preplanning. But one of the biggest challenges of large classes is that students can easily get lost in the sea of faces and will find it difficult to get to know their classmates or form study groups.

Julia Rodriguez (2016) highlights some of the challenges, particularly when introducing active learning in large enrollment classes, and the potential for using technology to help solve them. Rodriquez explored this topic through a case study, adding a flipped classroom component offered by librarians to teach research skills within a Health Sciences class. One challenge explored in detail in her study was how to track student completion of activities, with an initial approach of having students hand in printed copies and later moving to an auto-grading system.

Autograders can be useful in expediting feedback to students in large classes. Grossman et al (2017) observed improvements in an introductory computer science class when transitioning from manual grading to auto-grading. “Manual grading takes a significant amount of time, which (1) increases the latency between a homework being submitted and being returned with feedback, resulting in students repeating the same mistakes in labs and subsequent assignments, and (2) reduces the time the teaching staff can spend on mentoring students.” (Grossman, 2017)

Grossman et al go on to demonstrate the efficiency of the autograder in the following graph, depicting the number of runs processed by the autograder (students could submit to the autograder multiple times to have their work checked).

Grossman, 2017

While technology can reduce some of the burdens of the large enrollment class, many problems still remain. Some of the problems are derived from the fact that “the amount and intensity of interactions and exchanges between students and teachers generally reduce as class size increases and this can result in anonymity and passivity among students” (Mulryan-Kyne, 2010).

Integrating productive struggle into large classes is a particularly daunting task. When we are scaffolding learning content, we want to ensure we challenge students to think creatively and solve problems, and this is often most effective when they struggle together within a learning community. But how can we create meaningful learning communities in a large class environment when students struggle to get to know each other?

Andyflywrite, 2021

Large enrollment classes are prevalent and likely to remain, but they need not be limited to traditional lectures. (MacGregor, 2000) Even in the large class setting, small group inquiry activities can and should be used to support more meaningful student learning. According to MacGregor, students tend to have an overall negative perception of large enrollment classes, but she goes on to argue that improvements can be made to make large classes feel small with learning communities.

Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) is a form of active learning where students are prompted to work in a collaborative environment to apply abstract knowledge to real-world problems. In many ways, it is a structured and planned form of productive struggle. POGIL has its roots in problem-based learning, which originated in medical schools, first pioneered by McMaster Medical School in Canada. (Savin-Baden, 2008) It was introduced to address issues where students could retain knowledge and skill, but could not apply them in a practical situation.

A study conducted by Vincent-Ruz, Meyer, Roe, & Schunn (2020) followed students through a General Chemistry I course at an R1 university where some sections used POGIL and other sections relied on more traditional methods. The results of the study indicate that students enrolled in the POGIL version of the class had overall better learning outcomes across a variety of metrics.

Figure: Percentage of students in each condition with high chemistry-related attitudes and grades after General Chemistry I and after General Chemistry II. Vincent-Ruz, Meyer, T., Roe, S. G., & Schunn, C. D. (2020).

These results illustrate the need for such active forms of learning in introductory level science courses, which tend to be some of the largest courses on college campuses.

POGIL supports the social aspect of learning where students deal with new concepts together, and develop understanding through negotiation.

The POGIL Project, 2014

An important aspect of POGIL is to challenge students by solving problems with their peers in a real-world context so that the skills and knowledge they are learning are not limited to the classroom but can be applied.

Lev Vygotsky theorized that learning takes place in the Zone of Proximal Development which is just outside the zone of what a student already knows, but not so far out as the zone where a student lacks the ability to accomplish a task (Kalantzis, M. & Cope, B., 2008).

Wikipedia, 2022

While in the Zone of Proximal Development, the student requires some help in accomplishing the task. In a large enrollment class, where the student-to-teacher ratio is 200:1 or more, it would be impractical for the teacher to be assisting every single student, many of whom might have variations in where their zone of proximal development lies. Therefore it becomes ever more important for students to be able to work in learning communities so that peers can be the ones offering the support.

As Gabriel Peters (2022) puts it, “On certain occasions, you may be forced to cut short the time allocated for each student in order to accommodate all learners. This can result in frustration, and the students' urge to learn can slowly fade.”

According to Wulff, Nyquist, and Abbott in their chapter “Teaching Large Classes Well” (Weimer, 1987), there is a general, yet the false, belief that larger classes automatically result in lower quality of learning. While larger classes do not necessarily result in lower quality of learning, they do require more work to reach the same quality of learning that is often found in smaller classes. (Weimer, 1987, pp. 17-21)

Weimer points out that this negative perception comes in part from a lack of opportunity for direct interaction with the instructor. (1987) Given the need for support while in the Zone of Proximal Development, this makes sense. The solution lies in the cultivation of learning communities with strong peer-to-peer connections, allowing them to struggle together.

There are two angles to look at the potential shortcomings of the concepts of productive struggle in large enrollment classes. On the one hand, many would argue that the effort involved is more than many teachers are able or willing to invest and that the “tried and true” standard didact lecture approach will always suffice. The other angle to consider is that a common concern among educators is that classes are becoming too large, and rather than solving problems at scale our efforts should instead be directed at petitioning higher education administrators to reduce class sizes.

Moreover, accomplishing active learning at such a large scale relies heavily on technology, and many educators remain hesitant to have their classes rely so heavily on technology. As Frank Heppner puts it, “A piece of chalk is not a terribly effective teaching tool, but on the other hand not much can go wrong with it. A PowerPoint presentation can take your breath away, but it would take half a dozen paragraphs to list all the things that could go awry with it, from a program crash to a hard disc failure, to a burned-out $900 bulb in the projector.” (2007)

Productive struggle is a powerful tool in the classroom and is closely linked to many other aspects of educational psychology, however, it can be difficult to achieve in a large enrollment class. Generally, the productive struggle starts out with fairly direct interaction between the student and instructor to ensure the student doesn’t fall into an unproductive struggle. Direct interaction is difficult to achieve with a large number of students. This can be mediated by creating communities of learning within the larger class and having students tackle the struggle together, thereby offering each other support.

Students tend to be hesitant to take on a challenge, often preferring passive learning, so a good hook is needed to entice them to explore a challenging new problem. It is also important to avoid over-scaffolding and giving too much direction, which can lead to students memorizing steps rather than understanding processes, and ultimately causing more frustration when they cannot solve a new problem with the memorized approach.

The concept of productive struggle is closely tied to several other concepts of educational psychology, including the zone of proximal development posed by Vygotsky as well as the need for a social component of learning and the formation of a learning community. Productive struggle can be applied in practice using frameworks such as Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) where students work collaboratively while engaging in problems from real-world scenarios.