Can instructor feedback and failure dialogues reduce the stigma of failure and encourage help-seeking? An interdisciplinary undergraduate perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Failure is an important part of the learning process as it provides opportunity to reflect upon and modify study habits, can increase understanding and retention of concepts, and supports the development of resilience, an important skill within and beyond the university context. Despite these benefits, undergraduate students may have a negative perception of failure that may contribute to fear of failure and risk avoidance. We investigated the influence of instructor feedback, discussions of failure in the classroom, and course-level and institutional structures on students’ view of failure across disciplines. Undergraduate students at the [redacted for blind review] participated in an online survey (n = 304) consisting of Likert-scaled and open-ended questions on perceptions of failure, experience with instructor feedback, likelihood to engage in help-seeking, and course- and institutional-level suggestions to support learning from failure. When instructors discussed with their students how to best respond to feedback, students were more likely to view small failures as a helpful part of the learning process. Further, when instructors discussed strategies to best respond to failure, students were more likely to view failure as helpful for learning and less likely to view weak performance early in a course as an indication of future weak performance. Student-identified strategies to better support resilience included improved communication between students and instructors, in peer-to-peer conversations, and by the institution more broadly. Across all three areas, students expressed a desire for systems of higher education to destigmatize failure through changes in both rhetoric and policy. This suggests the incorporation of meaningful conversations and failure narratives in the classroom and beyond are effective strategies to encourage the development of resilience-based skills. Such discussions may help students engage positively with failure and maintain willingness to engage in future challenges. Keywords: learning from failure, higher education, resilience, help-seeking, feedback
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.031 | 0.097 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".