Undergraduate Student Perspectives on Failure During the Transition to Higher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines student perspectives on academic failure during the first year of postsecondary education. We focus on students??? personal definitions, responses to, and strategies for embracing and bouncing back from failure in their first year. In this study, students understood academic failure as a negotiation between self and institution. They articulated clear definitions of failure and offered a variety of strategies and approaches for managing it. Despite this, participants described early failures as destabilizing for their academic futures and highlighted social and institutional dynamics as determining how they approached current and future failures. We ask how institutional and pedagogical approaches might change if we incorporate student experiences of failure and their insights into the structures that govern higher education. The study will be useful to those interested in student perspectives on failure as well as those involved in development of first-year experience interventions.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".