Rather than freeing cognitive resources for learning, failure consumes them. Approaches that rely on failure to prepare learners for subsequent instruction or learning assume that learners will extract useful information from their unsuccessful attempts. This is precisely what novices are least able to do! Without sufficient prior knowledge, failure is of little diagnostic value. Learners can’t distinguish between relevant and irrelevant aspects of the task, can’t evaluate their own solution attempts, and can’t easily map feedback onto stable mental representations.