Prof. Dr Manu Kapur

Manu holds the Professorship for Learning Sciences and Higher Education at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and directs The Future Learning Initiative (FLI) at ETH Zurich. An ETH+ funded initiative, the FLI brings together more than 20 professors from 10 departments at ETH to advance research on the science of teaching and learning in higher education contexts, and translate it into the practice of teaching and learning at ETH Zurich. As a learning scientist, Manu makes a commitment not only to advancing the understanding of human learning but doing so in ways that make an impact in the actual ecologies of learning. Drawing on his engineering mindset for design, Manu conceptualized and developed the theory of Productive Failure to design for and bootstrap failure for learning mathematics better. He has done extensive work in real-field ecologies of STEM classrooms to transform teaching and learning using his theory of productive failure across a range of schools and universities around the world.

• Collins, Allan, and Manu Kapur. Cognitive apprenticeship. na, 2006.
• Kapur, M. (2008). Productive failure. Cognition and instruction, 26(3), 379-424.
• Kapur, M., & Bielaczyc, K. (2012). Designing for productive failure. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 21(1), 45-83.
• Jacobson, M. J., Goldwater, M., Markauskaite, L., Lai, P. K., Kapur, M., Roberts, G., & Hilton, C. (2020). Schema abstraction with productive failure and analogical comparison: Learning designs for far across domain transfer. Learning and Instruction, 65, 101222.

Watch: TEDx – Productive Failure